Quotes from Jo Walton

Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.

I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out.

Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark.

What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with them?" "He's Sokrates," I said. "He's like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear," she said.

Sometimes I think dressing to go out is the best part of the evening.

The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.

Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It's good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them message thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them.

Certainty closes many doors," he replied. "It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards.

I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught—though

Robert Heinlein says in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel that the only things worth studying are history, languages, and science. Actually, he adds maths, but honestly they left out the mathematical part of my brain.

I love you like stones fall downwards, like the sun rises.

You can never be sure where you are with magic.

I wish magic was more dramatic

Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it.

The next day we left for Rome. I had decided to make my books last and read only one book a week, but instead I gorged myself on them.

You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.

But imagine how he'd feel if you said that to him. It's not considering him as a person but as part of a class of inferior things.

Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?" Kebes put in. "In their livers, obviously," Sokrates said.

I don't know what I think about Jesus, but I know what I think about Aslan.

People tell you to write what you know, but I've found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up.

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

He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he'd keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That's a scientist," Gill said.

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.