Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

Let's pursue excellence together. Let's make art. Let's build the future. Let's be our best selves.

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?

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

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.

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

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

There's a way that money is freedom, but it isn't money, it's that money stands for having a choice.

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

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.

books as objects are not what books are , it's not what's important about them

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

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Good," I said. "And we will do the same. But I miss him. I miss him like I miss Mother. Of course we'll honor their memory, and of course their souls have gone on to new lives, but I hadn't finished talking to them in this life." I knew what death meant now. It was conversations cut off.

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.