Jasper Fforde Quotes

"He said you were very dangerous."
"No more dangerous than anyone else who dares to speak the truth."

“I am surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!”
“I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?”
I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this.

Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?

Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?”
I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.
“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”

"Last season we had the Reduced Shakespeare Company doing 'Highlights of the Mostly Complete History of Condensing Stuff (abridged)'."

No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.

"Haven't I seen your face somewhere else?"
"No, it's always been right here on the front of my head."

There were the rules we were taught, and there were the rules we did our job by. The two were related, but as distant cousins rather than siblings.

"You're crazy!"
"Undoubtedly. But look around you. You followed me in here. Who's crazier? The crazy or the crazy who follows him?"

"What do you think?"
"I can hardly contain my indifference."

"You need to delay the train."
"How do I do that?"
"Your head on the rails?"
"Seriously?"
"I don't know. But put it this way: if you don't delay the train, I will punch you five times hard in the head."
"Once would probably be enough as a punishment."
"You don't need to be punished, you need motivating. And not getting punched five times is a terrific motivator. Take my word for it."

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.

"I always really admired you growing up. Always smiling through your unhappiness. A real inspiration."
"I wasn't unhappy."
"You looked unhappy."
"Looks can be deceptive."
"All too true," she said, "but I meant what I said: inspirational in a sort of tragic way, like you were the failure in the family, but always looked on the bright side of everything."
"You're very kind," I said, long used to Megan's ways, "but it could have been much worse: I could have been born without tact or empathy, and be shallow, self-absorbed and hideously patronizing."

You’ll know the beginning easily enough; it’s when it all started going weird.

The first four in the series had been less a lighthearted chronicling of my adventures and more of a “Dirty Harry meets Fanny Hill,” but with a good deal more sex and violence.