"And here I am, still alive, still in the world.  It's my intention to carry on being alive in the world, well, until I die.  At Easter I'll go to Glasgow and see what science fiction fandom is like.  Next June I'll take my exams and pass them, and have qualifications.  Then I'll do A level, as it best works out.  I'll go to university.  I'll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to.  I'll grow and change and be myself.  I'll belong to libraries wherever I go.  Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.  I'll speak to varies as I see them and do magic as it comes my way and prevents harm - I'm not going to forget anything.  But I won't use it to cheat or to make my life unreal or go against the pattern.  Things will happen that I can't imagine.  I'll change and grow into a future that will be unimaginably different from the past.  I'll be alive.  I'll be me.  I'll be reading my book.  I'll never drown my books or break my staff.  I'll learn while I live.  Eventually I'll come to death, and die, and I'll go on through death to new life, or even, or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they did.  I'll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I happen to be on at the time.

That's what life is, and how I intend to live it."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"If you love books enough, books will love you back."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"It's just like the line in the Aeneid, Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, "even these things it will one day be a joy to recall."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"We went down the hill to the bookshop, sort of automatically, as if that's the way all our feet wanted to turn.  I said that to them.

'Bibliotropic,' Hugh said.  'Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun.  We naturally turn towards the bookshop.'"
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"There may be stranger reasons for being alive.

There are books.  There's Auntie Teg, and Grampar.  There's Sam, and Gill.  There's interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.  There's the distant hope of a karass sometime in the future.  There's Glorfindel who really care about me as much as a fairy can care about anything."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"May her memory be a blessing."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"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."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"It's lovely when writers I like like each other."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

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."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Still on the subject of eating, we don't have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups.  Like most of what we use, they're communal, they're handed out at random.  There's no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness.  Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup.  Nobody can get fond of anything.

At 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.  (We always felt they might at any moment.)  I suppose what they really did was psychological.  They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry.  Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"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 and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Let them fear me as long as they leave me alone.  Let them hate me as long as they fear me."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"It doesn't matter.  I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books."
-Among Others by Jo Walton