Jasper Fforde Quotes

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

Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception.

My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offense—which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straightaway.

The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in the The Owl that Morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.

Winter isn’t a season – it’s a calling.

"The ChronoGuard has shut itself down, and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically and theoretically…impossible."
"Good thing, too," replied Landen. "It always made my head ache. In fact I was thinking of doing a self-help book for SF novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't."

I don’t care one way or the other if the big A is using you to scratch an itch, but think very carefully of actions, Wonky. They have a dismaying tendency to be followed by consequences, and sometimes quite bad ones.

Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially, they’re all the same and reading from the same rule book. To get along you have to appreciate the rules, but also know that other people know the rules—and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?

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

Feedback loops, echo chambers, circular reinforcement. All could play a part in escalating the utterly imaginary to the level of reality, sometimes with fatal consequences.

"It's easy. A lobotomized monkey could do it."
"And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?"

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.

You’ve got a face longer than a Dickens novel.

"It's simply part of wider research on a neural expansifier that increases the synaptic pathways in the brain. Aside from repairing traumatic damage and reversing the effects of dementia, it can potentially make dumb people smart."
"I'm trying hard, but I'm not sure I can think of a more useful invention."

“Think of it this way: A single brain cell has no intelligence, but in company it can do extraordinary things. Perhaps the entirety of existence is the true, unifying intelligence that drives what occurs—for a reason that is quite beyond our understanding, or even to a higher plane where the concept of understanding is laughably redundant.”
It was an interesting concept. Mycroft had often theorized that the whole of existence was so large and hideously complex that it must be sentient. And if this were so, then it must have a truly warped sense of humor and have an abiding love of math and hydrogen—and a deep loathing for order.