Top 100 Jo Walton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Jo Walton

53. “I wish magic was more dramatic.”

— Jo Walton

54. “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

55. “I like her. She’s restful.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

57. “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.”

— Jo Walton

58. “Some say that I have self-awareness but no soul, that I am nothing but a machine. This seems un-Platonic as well as unfriendly, but it cannot be discounted as a terrifying possibility. I cannot erase this option simply because I dislike it so much. That too would be un-Platonic.”

— Jo Walton

59. “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.”

— Jo Walton

60. “You can never be sure where you are with magic.”

— Jo Walton

61. “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.”

— Jo Walton

62. “What you can’t pay back you pay forward.”

— Jo Walton

63. “To add insult to injury there’s a television at the end of the ward. It’s unavoidable, and even more unbearable than usual as it’s constantly tuned to ITV, so there are adverts. I wonder if hell is like this? I’d definitely prefer lakes of sulphur and at least being able to swim about in them.”

— Jo Walton

64. “Fiction’s nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.”

— Jo Walton

65. “Yet I felt he was innocent in a way I was not, that I knew more about evil than he ever could, because he had parents who loved him and wanted the best for him, while I had grown up with Mummy.”

— Jo Walton

66. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

68. “No wonder fairies run away from pain. They like to be entertained, and it’s awfully boring.”

— Jo Walton

69. “Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

71. “You feel what you feel, and I feel what I feel, but that doesn’t mean you have to fit us into a story and wreck both our lives.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

73. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

75. “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.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

77. “I still don’t know if you understand!” “That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes? Oh yes, I’m coming to understand that really well.” I.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

79. “It’s wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

83. “What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and how it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

86. “She wasn’t famous then,” Pat said. “Nobody is. You never know until too late. They’re just people like everyone else. Anyone you know might become famous. Or not. You don’t know which ones will make a difference or if any of them will. You might become famous yourself. You might change the world.”

— Jo Walton

87. “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.”

— Jo Walton

88. “I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught – though.”

— Jo Walton

89. “We had already agreed that, Father,” Penn said. “And of course they will likewise take the greater shares when we eat you. Berend and I are established, while our brother and sisters are still in need.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

91. “In the end, I sold my soul.” he had said, and Abby had replied “That wasn’t the end.”

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

94. “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.”

— Jo Walton

95. “I found myself being helped down to the car. That sort of help is actually a hindrance. If you ever see someone with a walking stick, that stick, and their arm, are actually a leg.”

— Jo Walton

96. “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.”

— Jo Walton

97. “You can’t do magic with books unless they’re very special copies.”

— Jo Walton

98. “Morally, magic is just indefensible.”

— Jo Walton

99. “I love the train. Sitting here I feel connected to the last time I sat here, and the train to London too. It is in-between, suspended; and in rapid motion towards and away from, it is also poised between. There’s a magic in that, not a magic you can work, a magic that’s just there, giving a little colour and exhilaration to everything.”

— Jo Walton

100. “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.”

— Jo Walton