Jo Walton

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

For too long I have silenced my heart, that now, when I give it the opportunity to speak, it no longer remembers its voice. Locked away, it forgot what it’s like to be free; to roam. Imprisoned within loneliness, I fear Stockholm syndrome has developed.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it’s too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within and available to you now.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.