Top 100 Jo Walton Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jo Walton

2. “May her memory be a blessing.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

5. “Let’s pursue excellence together. Let’s make art. Let’s build the future. Let’s be our best selves.”

— Jo Walton

6. “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.”

— Jo Walton

7. “I’ve always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you’re not thinking about them, but they’re hard to spot when you’re searching for them.”

— Jo Walton

8. “If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

10. “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.”

— Jo Walton

11. “There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

13. “If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn’t be so damn ineffable.”

— Jo Walton

14. “It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”

— Jo Walton

15. “The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything.”

— Jo Walton

16. “I do not miss my toys. I wouldn’t play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood.”

— Jo Walton

17. “Our myths, our legends, aren’t necessarily true, but they are truly necessary.”

— Jo Walton

18. “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.”

— Jo Walton

19. “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?”

— Jo Walton

20. “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.”

— Jo Walton

21. “Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean – reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.”

— Jo Walton

22. “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.”

— Jo Walton

23. “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.”

— Jo Walton

24. “Our souls know harmony and proportion before we are born, so although I had never seen anything like it, my soul resonated at once to the beauty of the city. Immediately.”

— Jo Walton

25. “Good,” I said. “And we will do the same. But I miss him. I miss him like I miss Mother. Of course we’ll honor their memory, and of course their souls have gone on to new lives, but I hadn’t finished talking to them in this life.” I knew what death meant now. It was conversations cut off.”

— Jo Walton

26. “If you love books enough, books will love you back.”

— Jo Walton

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Jo Walton

28. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

30. “There’s a way that money is freedom, but it isn’t money, it’s that money stands for having a choice.”

— Jo Walton

31. “The weather has changed completely in the last week. Last Saturday was mild and sunny, autumn looking reluctantly back over its shoulder towards summer. Today it was wet and blustery, autumn barrelling forward impatiently into winter.”

— Jo Walton

32. “I am reading The Lord of the Rings. I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey. When I put it down to this, I feel as if I am also waiting with Pippin for the echoes of that stone down the well.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

34. “You can’t trust everything that ass Plato wrote,” Sokrates said.”

— Jo Walton

35. “Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world’s only realist landscape painter.”

— Jo Walton

36. “Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn’t subject to scientific analysis, and it’s not supposed to be real but it’s pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.”

— Jo Walton

37. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

40. “It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.”

— Jo Walton

41. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

43. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

45. “I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. 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.”

— Jo Walton

46. “There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books There’s interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.”

— Jo Walton

47. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

49. “I wish magic was more dramatic.”

— Jo Walton

50. “You know, class is like magic. There’s nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it’s real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen.”

— Jo Walton