Quotes from Jo Walton

There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.

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

There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's amazing how large the things are that it's possible to overlook.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.