Jo Walton Quotes & Sayings

A rose, with the motto Dum spiro spero, which actually I rather like - while I breathe I shall hope. — Jo Walton

Robert Heinlein says in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel that the only things worth studying are history, languages, and science. Actually, he adds maths, but honestly they left out the mathematical part of my brain. — 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

I read a lot of older children's books when I was a kid, and you wouldn't believe how many sugar-coated tracts I sucked the sugar off and cheerfully ran off, spitting out the message undigested. (Despite going to church several times every Sunday for my who childhood, I never figured out Aslan was Jesus until told later.) — Jo Walton

Morally, magic is just indefensible. — Jo Walton

Some say that I have self-awareness but no soul, that I am nothing but a machine. This seems un-Platonic as well as unfriendly, but it cannot be discounted as a terrifying possibility. I cannot erase this option simply because I dislike it so much. That too would be un-Platonic. — Jo Walton

I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets. — Jo Walton

He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he'd keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That's a scientist, Gill said. — Jo Walton

What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and how it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that. — Jo Walton

There will always be some who see excellence and envy it instead of striving to emulate it. — Jo Walton

Being left alone - and I am being left alone - isn't quite as much what I wanted as I thought. Is this how people become evil? I don't want to be. — Jo Walton

There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books There's interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head. — Jo Walton

They want me to do something, and I'll do it, or I won't do it, and it'll work or not, and I'll survive or not. — Jo Walton

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. Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in the magic. Maybe fairies, the ones that aren't lost dead people, are concentrations, personifications, of the magic? And God? God is in everything, moving through everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That's why messing with magic so often becomes evil, because it's going against that pattern. I could almost see the pattern as the sun and clouds succeeded each other over the hills and I held the pain a little bit away, where it didn't hurt me. — 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

I believe that Plato was correct in saying that our souls long for the Good, and that nobody chooses evil for themselves while recognizing that it is evil, though some may do it in ignorance. — 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

The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It's not, I'm pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. — Jo Walton

Did an exercise at the end of every day, if I could keep awake long enough, when I tried to imagine the inner significance of everyone who had spoken to me that day. Before — Jo Walton

What I mean is, when I look at other people, other girls in school, and see what they like and what they're happy with and what they want, I don't feel as if I'm a part of their species. And sometimes
sometimes I don't care. — 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

If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable. — Jo Walton

eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn't as if they'll last me all week. — Jo Walton

I do not miss my toys. I wouldn't play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood. — Jo Walton

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 I can talk to 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. — Jo Walton

Trees are what paper was, and wants to be. — Jo Walton

If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf. — Jo Walton

To add insult to injury there's a television at the end of the ward. It's unavoidable, and even more unbearable than usual as it's constantly tuned to ITV, so there are adverts. I wonder if hell is like this? I'd definitely prefer lakes of sulphur and at least being able to swim about in them. — Jo Walton

Certainty closes many doors," he replied. "It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards. — 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 nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times. — Jo Walton

There's a thing - I've noticed it often. When I first say something, it's as if people don't hear me, they can't believe I'm saying it. Then they start to actually pay attention, they stop noticing that a teenage girl is talking and start to believe that it's worth listening to what I'm saying. — Jo Walton

In reality, while we aim for excellence, we're always living on somebody's dunghill. — Jo Walton

My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it for the first time entirely unspoiled. I won't know anything whatsoever about it, it will be wonderful, it will be exciting and layered and complex and I will be excited by it, and I will re-read it every year or so for the rest of my life, discovering more about it every time, and every time remembering the circumstances in which I first read it. — Jo Walton

Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances. — Jo Walton

[M]aybe we should have talked about this before. Well, we weren't gods, we couldn't go back and talk about it any earlier than now, but we could talk about it now. We go on from where we are. — Jo Walton

Magic isn't inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people. — Jo Walton

Would savor this mortal life while I had it, learn and experience all I could. And when it ended, I would take what I had learned and be a more excellent god and make the world better. — Jo Walton

Aujourd'hui, rien.
That's what Louis XVI wrote in his diary on the day of the storming of the Bastille. — 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

Sometimes I think dressing to go out is the best part of the evening. — Jo Walton

And his mother, especially as Botticelli had painted her and Auge carved her, seemed like a perfectly nice goddess. — Jo Walton

When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath. — Jo Walton

Human nature is against it. People just tend to behave in certain ways because they are people. And — Jo Walton

A re-read is more leisurely than a first read. I know the plot, after all, I know what happens. I may still cry (embarrassingly, on the train) when re-reading, but I won't be surprised. Because I know what's coming, because I'm familiar with the characters and the world of the story, I have more time to pay attention to them. I can immerse myself in details and connections I rushed past the first time and delight in how they are put together. I can relax into the book. I can trust it completely. I really like that. — Jo Walton

Burden of unconditional loving tugging at her, their needs and problems, and her inability to keep them safe and give them what they wanted. — 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

Peace is better than war. There's too much glorification of war and not enough glorification of peace, and especially not enough glorification of the importance of the doves. — Jo Walton

When I re-read, I know what I'm getting. It's like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity. — Jo Walton

But imagine how he'd feel if you said that to him. It's not considering him as a person but as part of a class of inferior things. — Jo Walton

You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies. — Jo Walton

You don't get a lot of chance to talk to people about things that matter to you, do you? she asked. — Jo Walton

I don't think I am like other people. I mean on some deep fundamental level. It's not just being half a twin and reading a lot and seeing fairies. It's not just being outside when they're all inside. I used to be inside. I think there's a way I stand aside and look backwards at things when they're happening which isn't normal. — Jo Walton

What's real within the story is real within the story — Jo Walton

You know, class is like magic. There's nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it's real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen. — Jo Walton

What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with them?" "He's Sokrates," I said. "He's like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear," she said. — Jo Walton

I still don't know if you understand!" "That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes? Oh yes, I'm coming to understand that really well." I — Jo Walton

It's the books I love best that are the hardest to write about. I don't want to take one angle on them, I want to dive into them and quote huge chunks and tell you everything about them, and it just isn't possible. — 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

It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets. — Jo Walton

I don't know what I think about Jesus, but I know what I think about Aslan. — Jo Walton

There is no perfection in human things, only in the world of Forms. — Jo Walton

Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices. — Jo Walton

This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon's present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite. — Jo Walton

I knew what death meant now. It was conversations cut off. — 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

Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark. — Jo Walton

We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends. — Jo Walton

Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter. — Jo Walton

Peace means something different from 'not fighting'. Those aren't peace advocates, they're 'stop fighting' advocates. Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it. — Jo Walton

if there are books perhaps it won't be all that bad. — Jo Walton

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it. — Jo Walton

I love you like stones fall downwards, like the sun rises. — Jo Walton

This school is enough to make anyone a communist. — Jo Walton

Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages. — Jo Walton

I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin. — Jo Walton

Doing is doing.
Does it mean that it doesn't matter if it's magic or not, anything you do has power and consequences and affects other people? — Jo Walton

I figured it out this afternoon, when they let me take a walk around the grounds, that these cows are stupid. Bovine. I knew the word, but I hadn't quite appreciated how literal it could be. I — Jo Walton

Magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened. — Jo Walton

You know what I'd love to read? A Dialogue between Bron and Shevek and Socrates. Socrates would love it too. I bet he wanted people who argued. You can tell he did, you can tell that's what he loved really, at least in The Symposium. — 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

Avan was as religious as the next young dragon with his way to make in the world-which is to say that he held many traditional beliefs which he had never paused to examine, attended church because it would have seemed strange not to, rarely paid much attention when he was there, and found piety out of the pulpit thoroughly misplaced. — Jo Walton

See, you're walking really fast now, you don't need it at all," she called after me. I stopped and turned around. I could feel my cheeks burning. The bus station was full of people. "Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn't need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would. If I could walk without it I'd break it in half across your back and run off singing. You have no right to talk to me like that, to talk to anyone like that. Who made you queen of the world when I wasn't looking? Why do you imagine I would go out with a stick I don't need - to try to steal your sympathy? I don't want your sympathy, that's the last thing I want. I just want to mind my own business, which is what you should be doing. — Jo Walton

Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn't to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there. — Jo Walton

Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?" Kebes put in. "In their livers, obviously," Sokrates said. — 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

Hardest of all were those problems about people doing incomprehensible things with no motivation. I was inclined to drift away from the sum to wonder why people would care what time two trains passed each other (spies), be so picky about seating arrangements (recently divorced people), or - which to this day remains incomprehensible - run the bath with no plug in. — Jo Walton

One thing I have learned about grief," I said to her, "is that nothing anyone says to you is useful, but it can still be comforting sometimes to know you're not alone — Jo Walton

Books as objects are not what books are, it's not what's important about them — Jo Walton

There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. — 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

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

I am reading The Lord of the Rings. I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey. When I put it down to this, I feel as if I am also waiting with Pippin for the echoes of that stone down the well. — Jo Walton

May her memory be a blessing. — Jo Walton

What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) — Jo Walton

The weather has changed completely in the last week. Last Saturday was mild and sunny, autumn looking reluctantly back over its shoulder towards summer. Today it was wet and blustery, autumn barrelling forward impatiently into winter. — Jo Walton

I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail. — 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

I hate it when people imply that people only read because they have nothing better to do. — 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