Among Others Quotes

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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, Among Others

“If you love books enough, books will love you back.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I care more for people in books than the people I see every day.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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, Among Others

“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. (p. 66)”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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, Among Others

“I don’t think I am like other people. I mean on some deep fundamental level. It’s not just being half a twin and reading a lot and seeing fairies. It’s not just being outside when they’re all inside. I used to be inside. I think there’s a way I stand aside and look backwards at things when they’re happening which isn’t normal.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I'm not sure I ever want to get married. I'm neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some "real thing." What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I'm not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.

The thing abou Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“It's amazing how large the things are that it's possible to overlook.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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, Among Others

“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.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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?”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“This isn’t a nice story, and this isn’t an easy story. But it is a story about fairies, so feel free to think of it as a fairy story. It’s not like you’d believe it anyway.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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, Among Others

“You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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, Among Others

“I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Anyway, while most people can't see fairies anyway because they don't believe in them, seeing them isn't a bad thing. Some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen have been fairies.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I would rather have Sign of the Unicorn than all the boys in the valleys.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“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 or the echoes of that stone down the well.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“It wasn't that we didn't know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We'd been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn't connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognized that they were from The Chrysalids.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others