Life & Wisdom Quote by Diana Wynne Jones

Jones is doing something sly: she flatters the reader while quietly relocating responsibility. “Everybody is probably a genius at something” sounds like a warm blanket, but it’s also a provocation. The word “probably” keeps it from becoming motivational wallpaper; it admits uncertainty, the way a good novelist does, and it smuggles in a harder truth: talent isn’t self-evident. It has to be found, named, practiced into existence.

Her real target is the cultural machinery that treats aptitude like a standardized test score. “People need encouragement to sort out” implies that the sorting is work, not a personality quiz. It’s a pushback against the school-and-career funnel that rewards early bloomers and punishes late or sideways developers. Jones wrote for young readers in worlds where magic often looks like inconvenience before it looks like power; the line carries that same ethic. Gifts can be misread as weirdness, distraction, or failure until someone (a teacher, a friend, a book) helps you translate them.

The subtext is both generous and impatient: stop waiting for permission. “Finding this” is framed as a discovery, but it’s also a refusal of fatalism. Genius, in her formulation, isn’t an elite club; it’s a mismatch between person and environment that can be corrected. Coming from a fantasy writer, the message lands with particular bite: the miraculous is common, but only if you learn to recognize the spell you already have.