Quotes from Jo Walton

1 tatty old man in jeans—what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.

It's nonsense for it to be illegal," Patty said briskly. "It may be immoral and unclean because it's outside marriage, but it shouldn't be illegal. That's nonsense.

Having a world unfold in one's head is the fundamental SF experience. It's a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence "The red sun is high, the blue low"—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.

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

There's nothing less exciting than being thought of as part of a class of beings that are all the same," I said. "You're treating me as a thing.

if there are books perhaps it won't be all that bad.

You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic.

We are all inside her head and nowhere else, and of such stuff as dreams are made of. Once she's gone where will we be?

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

Give me the good for which I do not know to ask,

Prophecy is only sometimes helpful.

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

did an exercise at the end of every day, if I could keep awake long enough, when I tried to imagine the inner significance of everyone who had spoken to me that day. Before

I like a writer who cares and takes sides. Pretending to be unbiased is only another kind of bias, and pretending to be dispassionate is often a way of supporting the status quo.

And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything.

Know yourself.

how interesting that what comes out as doing the best he could in a man looks like neglect in a woman.

Which isn't to say I think women should be stuck with childrearing, but—how interesting that what comes out as doing the best he could in a man looks like neglect in a woman.

I couldn't be anything. I could barely manage to hold out my shape in the world.

eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn't as if they'll last me all week.

There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.

It was lovely to be cooking with actual food. There's something so grounding about it. It's not that I was doing any magic, beyond the magic it is to take big flat mushrooms and raw potatoes and turn them into something totally delicious. I was just making dinner. But I wonder how much of cooking for someone else is magic anyway, more than I know about. I think it might all be.

I got to help make dinner. You can't imagine the pleasure of wiping mushrooms and grating cheese when you haven't had a chance to do it for a long time. Then eating food you have cooked, or help cook, always tastes so much better. Auntie

If I'm stuck in bed it's not unusual for me to read half a dozen books in a day. I know I'm not going to live forever, I know there are more books than I can ever read. But I know that in my head, the same way I know the speed of light is a limit. In my heart I know reading is forever and FTL is just around the corner.