Jo Walton Quotes

You can't trust everything that ass Plato wrote, Sokrates said.

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.

Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter.

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

May her memory be a blessing.

You can never be sure where you are with magic.

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

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

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

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

Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.

It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

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.

Burden of unconditional loving tugging at her, their needs and problems, and her inability to keep them safe and give them what they wanted.

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.

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

What's real within the story is real within the story

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

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

There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.

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

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

If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.

What you can't pay back you pay forward.

I wish magic was more dramatic

And his mother, especially as Botticelli had painted her and Auge carved her, seemed like a perfectly nice goddess.

No wonder fairies run away from pain. They like to be entertained, and it's awfully boring.

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

I hate it when people imply that people only read because they have nothing better to do.

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

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

I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.

Marx is like Plato, he has dreams that can't come true as long as people are people.

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

Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

It's amazing how large the things are that it's possible to overlook.

Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything.

There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.

You don't get a lot of chance to talk to people about things that matter to you, do you? she asked.

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

When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath.

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

I do not miss my toys. I wouldn't play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood.

Morally, magic is just indefensible.

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

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

Human nature is against it. People just tend to behave in certain ways because they are people. And

Magic isn't inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All farms are much alike everywhere, and all wild places have their own beauty.

I'll take Heinlein over a headmistress any day.

This school is enough to make anyone a communist.

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.

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

It's lovely when writers I like like each other.

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

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

Fiction's nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.

I didn't laugh, but it was a near thing. It's hard when someone is just exactly like a parody.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

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

I like her. She's restful.

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

If you love books enough, books will love you back.