Jo Walton

It__ lovely when writers I like like each other.

At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar__ chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma__ shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother__ shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn__ use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she__ 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__ stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn__ 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.

You 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.

Magic isn__ inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.

I'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?)

You 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.

magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened.

I wish magic was more dramatic

You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.

You can never be sure where you are with magic.

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.

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.

If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.

On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn__ have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don__ think they did it more than twice. Then there__ the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there__ 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.

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.

There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.

There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.

Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I__ doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean__eading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.