Top 100 Jo Walton Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.
Jo Walton
#4. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.
Jo Walton
#5. A rose, with the motto Dum spiro spero, which actually I rather like - while I breathe I shall hope.
Jo Walton
#6. 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
#7. Yet I felt he was innocent in a way I was not, that I knew more about evil than he ever could, because he had parents who loved him and wanted the best for him, while I had grown up with Mummy.
Jo Walton
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. There's something nice about out-and-out children's books with no sex and a happy ending - Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing.
Jo Walton
#12. What you can't pay back you pay forward.
Jo Walton
#13. There will always be some who see excellence and envy it instead of striving to emulate it.
Jo Walton
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away.
Jo Walton
#18. You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.
Jo Walton
#19. I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out.
Jo Walton
#20. When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath.
Jo Walton
#21. 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
#22. I got to help make dinner. You can't imagine the pleasure of wiping mushrooms and grating cheese when you haven't had a chance to do it for a long time. Then eating food you have cooked, or help cook, always tastes so much better. Auntie
Jo Walton
#23. Aujourd'hui, rien.
That's what Louis XVI wrote in his diary on the day of the storming of the Bastille.
Jo Walton
#24. I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught - though
Jo Walton
#25. 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
#26. Fiction's nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.
Jo Walton
#27. Anyway, while most people can't see fairies anyway because they don't believe in them, seeing them isn't a bad thing. Some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen have been fairies.
Jo Walton
#28. eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn't as if they'll last me all week.
Jo Walton
#29. What's real within the story is real within the story
Jo Walton
#30. Let's pursue excellence together. Let's make art. Let's build the future. Let's be our best selves.
Jo Walton
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. In the end, I sold my soul." he had said, and Abby had replied "That wasn't the end.
Jo Walton
#34. Magic isn't inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.
Jo Walton
#35. You can never be sure where you are with magic.
Jo Walton
#36. If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.
Jo Walton
#37. 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.
Jo Walton
#38. Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything.
Jo Walton
#39. If you love books enough, books will love you back.
Jo Walton
#40. I hate it when people imply that people only read because they have nothing better to do.
Jo Walton
#41. I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
Jo Walton
#42. We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends.
Jo Walton
#43. 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
#44. Human nature is against it. People just tend to behave in certain ways because they are people. And
Jo Walton
#45. Sometimes I think dressing to go out is the best part of the evening.
Jo Walton
#46. 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
#47. It's amazing how large the things are that it's possible to overlook.
Jo Walton
#48. 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
#49. 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.
Jo Walton
#50. 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.
Jo Walton
#51. [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
#52. 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
#53. I am small, but sometimes I am a small part of great things.
Jo Walton
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. There's a way that money is freedom, but it isn't money, it's that money stands for having a choice.
Jo Walton
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.
Jo Walton
#60. I don't know what I think about Jesus, but I know what I think about Aslan.
Jo Walton
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.
Jo Walton
#65. Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.
Jo Walton
#66. Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?" Kebes put in. "In their livers, obviously," Sokrates said.
Jo Walton
#67. I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.
Jo Walton
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time.
Jo Walton
#74. 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
#75. All farms are much alike everywhere, and all wild places have their own beauty.
Jo Walton
#76. 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
#77. It's lovely when writers I like like each other.
Jo Walton
#78. You don't want anything from them except for them to exist and you to see them sometimes and talk to them, and maybe for them to like you back.
Jo Walton
#79. Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.
Jo Walton
#80. I love you like stones fall downwards, like the sun rises.
Jo Walton
#81. I didn't laugh, but it was a near thing. It's hard when someone is just exactly like a parody.
Jo Walton
#82. 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
#83. I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.
Jo Walton
#84. 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
#85. I don't need to be a radical to think that who a dragon is counts more than birth or wealth," Selendra said, with what dignity she could."Why, that's the very definition of a radical," he retorted.
Jo Walton
#86. 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.
Jo Walton
#87. 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.
Jo Walton
#88. Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices.
Jo Walton
#89. 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
#90. Our souls know harmony and proportion before we are born, so although I had never seen anything like it, my soul resonated at once to the beauty of the city. Immediately
Jo Walton
#91. 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.
Jo Walton
#92. Give me the good for which I do not know to ask,
Jo Walton
#93. 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
#94. 1 tatty old man in jeans - what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.
Jo Walton
#95. 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
#96. Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter.
Jo Walton
#97. That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes?
Jo Walton
#98. 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
#99. Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It's good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them message thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them.
Jo Walton
#100. Marx is like Plato, he has dreams that can't come true as long as people are people.
Jo Walton
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