Jasper Fforde Quotes

“I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!”

“There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says… it's payback time!”

“He was, after all, the ultimate rebel -- it takes a lot of cojones to stand up to Zeus.”

“Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just… well,, that's all.”

“True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is…”

“History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.”

“What is there to forgive?… Ignore forgive and concentrate on living. Life for you is short; far too short to allow small jealousies to infringe on the happiness which can be yours only for the briefest of times.”

“I was on HPD--Heathcliff Protection Duty--in Wuthering Heights for two years, and believe me, the ProCaths tried everything. I personally saved him from assassination eight times.”

“We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.”

“Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything.”

“Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.”

“You many have noticed I have a temper… but when I calmed down, I realized that this world, blighted and imperfect as it is, would be better with you in it.”

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”

“the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”

“The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over 30 millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.”

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

“Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.”

“If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.”

“Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”

“Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.”

“Do I have to talk to insane people?"
"You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.”

“Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.”

“The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable.”

“Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.”

“Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.”

“The safest course was actually the simplest-do nothing at all and hope everything turned out for the best. It wasn't a great plan, but it had the benefits of simplicity and a long tradition.”

“Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.”

“You'll like it here; everyone ismad.”

“Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.”

“the best lies to tell are the ones people want to believe”

“Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.”

“Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment--the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.”

“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

“Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.”

“…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?
What do you mean, odd?'
Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.”

“Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.”

“You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.”

“I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.”

“If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote, I must be dafter than I look.”

“Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.”

“Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.”

“Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn"t what it used to be?”

“I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.”

“Fanfiction isn't copying - it's a. One long party, from the first capital letter to the last full stop!”

“Almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon.”

“Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.”

“I have the death sentence in seven genres.”

“Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing.”

“The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.”

“The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil.”

“Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.”

“How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?”

“Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way.”

“Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.”

“I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.”

“Cats aren't really friendly, they're just cozying up to the dominant life-form as a hedge against extinction.”

“Were you listening to a word I said '
'I kind of switched off when you drew breath.”

“Palindrome as well. My sister's name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times World Scrabble Champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score.”

“Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.”

“Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.”

“That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.”

“Defiance through compliance.”

“What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?”

“I don’t know—avant verrais?”

“Sometimes choice is a luxury that fate does not afford us.”

“Apart from the faint odor of ink that pervaded the scene, it might have been real.”

“… the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.”