Quotes from Jo Walton

One thing I have learned about grief," I said to her, "is that nothing anyone says to you is useful, but it can still be comforting sometimes to know you're not alone

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.

Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.

This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon's present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite.

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

I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.

We, and Plato, meant nothing but the best for them! And when I say the best I mean it literally; what we wanted for them was nothing but excellence, virtue, arete. They say you can't want that for somebody else, they have to want it for themselves. Well, perhaps they have a point. But Plato wrote that seeking to increase someone else's excellence is the best form of love.

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.

That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes?

There's something nice about out-and-out children's books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing.

This school is enough to make anyone a communist.

In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character. In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.

Aujourd'hui, rien. That's what Louis XVI wrote in his diary on the day of the storming of the Bastille.

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.)

Peace is better than war. There's too much glorification of war and not enough glorification of peace, and especially not enough glorification of the importance of the doves.

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.

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.

She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn't understand it.

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.

Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices.

There is no perfection in human things, only in the world of Forms.

Writers are not nice people. We can't be.

I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.