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Jo Walton Quotes | Quotes said by Jo Walton

  • Jo Walton Quote #1

    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 Quote #2

    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 Quote #3

    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 Quote #4

    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.

  • Jo Walton Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    I wish magic was more dramatic

  • Jo Walton Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #14

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #15

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #16

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #17

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #18

    It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

  • Jo Walton Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

  • Jo Walton Quote #21

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #22

    magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened.

  • Jo Walton Quote #23

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

  • Jo Walton Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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