Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

What I'm saying is people like Hoodwink are not kind of evil villains, they're part of humanity. We can choose to disassociate ourselves from them and we can choose to pretend they're not there, but they are. We're all together in this.

There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition.

I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere.

We have to know that the bad guys are not different from us in the world.

I don't believe that pure evil exists, personally.

You can't suppress the things that make us human. It's pointless to try.

I personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

Most people aren't good or bad. They're naive.

I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

I have been allowed to inhabit different shades of human nature and different colours of truth indifferent circumstances.

People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

People don't want other people to be people.

There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face." (pp. 348-349)