Jasper Fforde Quotes

"I'll tell you what love is," I told her. "It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your heart and soul to the smiter!"

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

"And nothing can stop it?"
"Nothing I know of," he replied sadly. "The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really."

More welcoming were a couple of Welsh Tourist Board posters. One was advertising the local area with the now-universal slogan “Visit Wales – Not Always Raining.”

Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just...well, differently moraled, that’s all.

"Tell them ballocks."
"They'll pay me five hundred guineas."
"Cancel the ballocks thing—tell them you'll be honored and overjoyed."
"It's a sellout. I don't do sellouts. Not for that price anyway."

To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. 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. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.

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

Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback.

"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."

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.

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?

Books”—Snell smiled—“are a kind of magic.

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

Rescue seemed a very remote possibility, and that was at the nub of the whole ethical-dilemma argument. You never come out on top, no matter what. The only way to win the game is not to play.