Quotes from Jasper Fforde

Defiance through compliance.

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

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

Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.

Do you really think you'd win a PR war against a bunch of committed librarians?' He thought about this, but he knew I was right. The libraries were a treasured institution and so central to everyday life that government and commerce rarely did anything that might upset them.Some say they were more powerful than the military, or, if not, they were certainly quieter. As they say: Don't mess with librarians. Only they use a stronger word than 'mess'...

There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says...it's payback time!

What's the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn't happened yet?" "I don't know—avant verrais?

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.

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.

Books - Snell smiled - are a kind of magic.

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

A surfeit of information often hides an untruth," he said, with annoying clarity.

Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day.

He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. Friends, he'd once said, are probably great, but I have forty thousands friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention.

the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.

I was in '78 recently, he announced. I brought you this. He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title. Didn't they split in '70? Not always. How are things?

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?

Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then — and this is the important bit — do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.

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

The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.

I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton--go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday--I don't know why--and my father had no name at all--his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me...

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, O'er a plan to venge myself upon that cursed Thursday Next- This Eyre affair, so surprising, gives my soul such loath despising, Here I plot my temper rising, rising from my jail of text. "Get me out!" I said, advising, "Pluck me from this jail of text- or I swear I'll wring your neck!

Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle? The what? The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you. Don't know what you're talking about, dear girl.