Top 15 Jasper Fforde Quotes

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

The numbers were too great for HiberTech to hide what had happened. As it was, well-engineered corporate surprise, orchestrated bafflement, faux delight, suitable soul-searching and feigned contrition won the day.

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

"Oh, hullo, Worthing," he said in a cheery manner. "How are things?"
"Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass."

"How is that working out?" I asked.
"Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive."

I’d been so convinced of that particular narrative I never for one moment stopped to reappraise the situation.

People die in the Winter; it’s what it’s there for.

"It doesn't matter if it's true or not," he said, "it's what everyone believes that's important."

"I lost sixty soldiers under my command."
"Your fault?" I asked.
"No, but they were all my responsibility, so it amounts to the same thing."

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.

"Agree?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I don't like subordinates always agreeing," she said. "Sycophants have no place in my department. You're to speak your mind when the opportunity calls for it."
"How will I know when that is?"
"I shall inform you."

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

No, I don’t want to seem underhand or insulting but Toccata’s a poisonous, untrustworthy, self-serving little reptile – with a severe personality disorder and a disquieting capacity for cannibalism.

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.

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.