Quotes from Jo Walton

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A rose, with the motto Dum spiro spero , which actually I rather like—while I breathe I shall hope.

They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?

There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.

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

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.

I like her. She's restful.

James Davis Nicoll, on the 1962 nominees: "Terry Pratchett has his own sword forged by his own hands from meteoric iron, which must be of considerable utility when negotiating contracts.

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.

Consider Augustus's motto. Hurry more slowly.

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?

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

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.

I'll take Heinlein over a headmistress any day.

You feel what you feel, and I feel what I feel, but that doesn't mean you have to fit us into a story and wreck both our lives.

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

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

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

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.