Jo Walton Quotes

There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.

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.

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

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

Our myths, our legends, aren't necessarily true, but they are truly necessary. They have to do with the way we interpret the world and our place in it.

It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Fiction's nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.

What you can't pay back you pay forward.

This school is enough to make anyone a communist.

In the end, I sold my soul." he had said, and Abby had replied "That wasn't the end.

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.

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.

Marx is like Plato, he has dreams that can't come true as long as people are people.

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.

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.

I would rather have Sign of the Unicorn than all the boys in the valleys.

I've always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you're not thinking about them, but they're hard to spot when you're searching for them.

The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.

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

Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time.

I wish magic was more dramatic

I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught - though

Harriet! I've never met anyone called Harriet in real life. I had a brief fantasy about her being Harriet Vane, because she'd be about the right age for that, except that Harriet Vane would be addressed as Lady Peter, and anyway she's fictional. I can tell the difference, really I can.

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

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.

The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Has spending more time with her stopped you thinking she's perfect?" I asked.
Pico smiled. "No. She's perfect. But I do understand her better. She's the perfect Athene, and that includes a certain amount of pride and vanity and temper."
"But surely - you know I'm not perfect!"
"But you are," he said, picking out the books and piling them on the bed. "You are the perfect Apollo. You're the light. And both of you grow and change and become more excellent, while remaining perfect as you are. Perfection isn't static. It's a dynamic form.

Hippopotamus,
As the leaves fall to the ground
Mechs now leave Japan

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

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.

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.

Consider Augustus's motto. Hurry more slowly.

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.

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.

It wasn't that we didn't know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We'd been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn't connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognized that they were from The Chrysalids.

They were ghosts, I suppose, the procession of the dead. They weren't pale kings and pale maidens, they were work-worn men and women - perfectly ordinary people, except for being dead. You'd never mistake them for living people. You couldn't quite see through them, but they were even more drained of colour than everything else, and they weren't quite as solid as they ought to be. One of the men I recognised. He had been sitting in Fedw Hir near Grampar making blubbing sounds with his mouth. Now he strode along easily with a spring in his step. His face was grave and composed, he was a man with dignity and purpose. He bent and picked up one of my oak leaves from the path and offered it like a ticket at the cinema as he passed between the two trees. I didn't see anyone take it. I couldn't see into the darkness at all.

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.

(She has read LOTR, and I don't know if she read it identifying with all of the evil people and hoping the good ones wouldn't resist their temptations, but I know she has read it because the first time I read it, it was her copy. This proves that just reading it isn't enough. After all, the devil can quote scripture.)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

This isn't a nice story, and this isn't an easy story. But it is a story about fairies, so feel free to think of it as a fairy story. It's not like you'd believe it anyway.

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.

The next day we left for Rome. I had decided to make my books last and read only one book a week, but instead I gorged myself on them.

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.

I talked far more than I should have. I knew it even at the time. I just couldn't stop myself. I didn't actually interrupt anyone, which would be unforgivable, I just didn't hold back enough to give other people a turn.

No wonder fairies run away from pain. They like to be entertained, and it's awfully boring.

Morally, magic is just indefensible.

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.

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.

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.

It's lovely when writers I like like each other.

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?

Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn't care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.

I am small, but sometimes I am a small part of great things.

Elms are dying all over the place, it's Dutch elm disease. [ ... ] It came from America on a load of logs, and it's a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that's why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you'd never think it was part of all the others. You'd see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.

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

Still on the subject of eating, we don't have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups. Like most of what we use, they're communal, they're handed out at random. There's no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness. Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup. Nobody can get fond of anything. 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.

If you love books enough, books will love you back.

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

What's real within the story is real within the story

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.

I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.

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.

Certainty closes many doors," he replied. "It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards.

Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.

Give me the good for which I do not know to ask,

We had already agreed that, Father," Penn said. "And of course they will likewise take the greater shares when we eat you. Berend and I are established, while our brother and sisters are still in need.

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

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

And at year's end they broke the stable door. The man and his horse, together, gallop yet, Beyond the sunset's end, the pounding hooves, Both harmony and beat for their duet.

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.

People tell you to write what you know, but I've found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up. It's easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it's much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little more detachment. It's terrible advice! So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though.

And what he had offered me was exactly everything I most wanted - to make art, to build the future, to help each other become our best selves. He honors me.

I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect.

You can never be sure where you are with magic.

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.

They hang people for murder, and while I didn't exactly like Mummy, she was my mother after all. Though do they hang Viscountesses?

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

She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn't understand it.

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.

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.

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.

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

There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.

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

For that is to be my purpose here, you see, to teach rhetoric to you children: I, who was never a teacher but who liked to converse with my friends and seek out the nature of things."

"They have their own imagination of who you are, but you are not that," Kebes said.

"Now that's true," Sokrates said. "And perhaps what I shall teach is not what they expect me to teach.