Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

As human beings, it's good to build stories.

I see myself as a storyteller. So, when I read something, I see the story, and I see it on screen, in my head, in a certain way. I always want to see it and see me in it.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

No story lives unless someone wants to listen. So thank you, all of you.

I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

The world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

All the stories have to do with emotion. Emotion is driving everything.

...we all want to hear stories, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. Stories connect our little lives with the world around us and help us discover who we are.

There is no greater power on this earth than story.

Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive

Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told