01UndatedThere 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedI'm only fifteen. 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 to talk 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. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?Jo Walton / quote ↗
04UndatedIt doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.Jo Walton / quote ↗
07UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
08Undatedthe 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 / quote ↗
09UndatedReading 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 / quote ↗
10UndatedThere's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.Jo Walton / quote ↗
11UndatedAnd 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 / quote ↗
12UndatedOn the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. 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 / quote ↗
13UndatedClass 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 / quote ↗
14Undatedmagic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened.Jo Walton / quote ↗
15UndatedIt 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 / quote ↗
19UndatedYou can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is. It's like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn't mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn't because you did the magic.Jo Walton / quote ↗
20UndatedI'm so glad I have my own copy. I can read them again and again. I can read them again and again on trains, all my life, and every time I do I'll remember today and it will connect up. (Is that magic?)Jo Walton / quote ↗
21UndatedMagic isn’t inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.Jo Walton / quote ↗
22UndatedAt home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. I suppose what they really did was physiological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry.Jo Walton / quote ↗
23UndatedYou can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is.Jo Walton / quote ↗
