Jasper Fforde: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.”

“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?”

“I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time.”

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

“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.”

“There are a lot of idiots in this country, and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”

“If it's a chimera alert, we just follows the screams.”

“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.”

“Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question.”

“Miss Havisham had told me about Generics. They were created here in the Well to populate the books that were to be written. At the point of creation they were simply a human canvas without paint - blank like a coin, ready to be stamped with individualism. They had no history, no conflicts, no foibles - nothing that might make them either readable or interesting in any way. It was up to various institutions to teach them to be useful members of fiction. They were graded, too. A to D, one through ten. Any that were D-graded were like worker bees in crowds and busy streets. Small speaking parts were C-grades; B-grades usually made up the bulk of featured but not leading characters. These parts usually -but not always- went to the A-grades, handpicked for their skills at character projection and multidimensionality.”