Jo Walton

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

“I'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?”

“If you love books enough, books will love you back.”

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

“You can never be sure where you are with magic.”

“What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?”

“Magic isn’t inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”