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

Jo Walton Quotes

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

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

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.

— Jo Walton

Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn’t to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there.

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

— Jo Walton

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

May her memory be a blessing.

— Jo Walton

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

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

Morally, magic is just indefensible.

— Jo Walton

Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.

— Jo Walton

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

I don’t think you realize how different it is for me than for you. You can make your way by your own wits and claws, while I must always be dependent on some male to protect me. Wits I may have, but claws I am without, and while hands are useful for writing and fine work they are no use in a battle.

— Jo Walton

Writers are not nice people. We can’t be.

— Jo Walton

They were not always in accord, but over time they developed such good communication that even their most bitter disagreements became part of their axiomatic assumption of mutual long-term ongoing love and life together.

— Jo Walton

Canada’s slow, complicated, and expensive emigration policy, which on one level nobody can admit exists mainly to keep out Americans who are desperate for healthcare.

— Jo Walton
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