Jo Walton Quotes

They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
Jo Walton
It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.
Jo Walton
Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.
Jo Walton
Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.
Jo Walton
The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away.
Jo Walton
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.
Jo Walton
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.
Jo Walton
My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.
Jo Walton
In reality, while we aim for excellence, we're always living on somebody's dunghill.
Jo Walton
I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.
Jo Walton
I found myself being helped down to the car. That sort of help is actually a hindrance. If you ever see someone with a walking stick, that stick, and their arm, are actually a leg.
Jo Walton
In the end, I sold my soul." he had said, and Abby had replied "That wasn’t the end.
Jo Walton
The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there's a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn't.
Jo Walton
This school is enough to make anyone a communist.
Jo Walton
what's real within the story is real within the story
Jo Walton
There's a way that money is freedom, but it isn't money, it's that money stands for having a choice.
Jo Walton
What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?
Jo Walton
She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn't meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more important.
Jo Walton
In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.
Jo Walton
You couldn’t get worse food, or food more detached from nature, if you tried. If you have an apple, you’re connected to an apple tree. If you have a dish of set custard and half a glace cherry you’re not connected to anything.
Jo Walton
I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now.
Jo Walton
One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.
Jo Walton
It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.
Jo Walton
You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is.
Jo Walton
At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. I suppose what they really did was physiological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry.
Jo Walton
Magic isn’t inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.
Jo Walton
I'm so glad I have my own copy. I can read them again and again. I can read them again and again on trains, all my life, and every time I do I'll remember today and it will connect up. (Is that magic?)
Jo Walton
You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.
Jo Walton
magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened.
Jo Walton
It isn't really magic, except that it is. It's not magic that reaches into the world ands changes things. It's all inside my body. I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic.
Jo Walton
You can never be sure where you are with magic.
Jo Walton
I wish magic was more dramatic
Jo Walton
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.
Jo Walton
On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it.
Jo Walton
And there's no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think, yes, the world would be better off without it.
Jo Walton
There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.
Jo Walton
Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean—reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.
Jo Walton
the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or to accept responsibility.
Jo Walton
I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.
Jo Walton
I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
Jo Walton
If you love books enough, books will love you back.
Jo Walton
It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
Jo Walton
I'm only fifteen. I'm not sure I ever want to get married. I'm neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some "real thing". What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody to talk about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I'm not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?
Jo Walton
If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.
Jo Walton
There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.
Jo Walton