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...

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...

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.

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

This school is enough to make anyone a communist.

On 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...

You couldn’t get worse food, or food more detached from nature, if you tried. If you have an apple, you’re connected to an apple tree. If you have a dish of set custard and half...

In the end, I sold my soul.” he had said, and Abby had replied “That wasn’t the end.

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

One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.

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

I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.

I 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....

It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.

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

The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there’s a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn’t.

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.

I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now.

The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually true, but that makes...

I found myself being helped down to the car. That sort of help is actually a hindrance. If you ever see someone with a walking stick, that stick, and their arm, are actually a leg.

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

The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That’s why I ran away.

I am reading The Lord of the Rings. I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much...

In reality, while we aim for excellence, we’re always living on somebody’s dunghill.

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...

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.

Reading 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...

My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves...

I wish magic was more dramatic

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

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...

You can never be sure where you are with magic.

It’s wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn’t meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more...

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

Elms are dying all over the place, it’s Dutch elm disease. […] It came from America on a load of logs, and it’s a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it...

There’s a way that money is freedom, but it isn’t money, it’s that money stands for having a choice.