Jo Walton > Jo's Quotes

“I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Let’s pursue excellence together. Let’s make art. Let’s build the future. Let’s be our best selves.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“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, The Just City

“In reality, while we aim for excellence, we're always living on somebody's dunghill.”
― Jo Walton, The Philosopher Kings

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

“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

“Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“The great breakthrough of our age is supposed to be that we measure success by happiness, admiring a man for how much he enjoyed his life, rather than how much wealth or fame he hoarded, that old race with no finish line. Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied. Diogenes is greater. Or does that past-tainted inner part of you—the part that still parses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘he’ and ‘she’—still think that happiness alone is not achievement without legacy? Diogenes has a legacy. Diogenes ruled nothing, wrote nothing, taught nothing except by the example of his life to passersby, but, so impressed were those bypassers, that, after the better part of three millennia, we still know this about him.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“The most difficult speculation for a science fiction writer to undertake is to imagine correctly the *secondary* implications of a new factor. Many people correctly anticipated the coming of the horseless carriage, some were bold enough to predict that everyone would use them and the horse would disappear. But I know of no writer, fiction or non-fiction, who saw ahead of time the vast change in the courting and mating habits of Americans which would result primarily from the automobile."

Expanded Universe”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or to accept responsibility.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“In the end, I sold my soul." he had said, and Abby had replied "That wasn’t the end.”
― Jo Walton, Half a Crown

“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, Starlings

“Hippopotamus,
As the leaves fall to the ground
Mechs now leave Japan”
― Jo Walton