Quotes from Lost in a Good Book

Jasper Fforde ·  399 pages

Rating: (43.8K votes)


“Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“I'll tell you what love is" I said, "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.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“You'll like it here; everyone is quite mad.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book



“…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?
What do you mean, odd?'
Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark."

"A whale isn't a fish, Thursday."

"A whale shark is--sort of."

"All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish."

"A crayfish isn't a fish."

"A starfish, then."

"Still not a fish."

"This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“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.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“I was on HPD--Heathcliff Protection Duty--in Wuthering Heights for two years, and believe me, the ProCaths tried everything. I personally saved him from assassination eight times.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book



“What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?”

“I don’t know—avant verrais?”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“You nearly killed eight people!" I managed to gasp out loud.
"My count was closer to twelve," returned Havisham as she opened the door. "And anyhow, you can't nearly kill someone. Either they are dead or they are not.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Scientific thought - indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else - is just like the fashions that we wear - only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“My temper began to rise -- always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book



“It wasn’t going to be hard…it was going to be impossible. It wouldn’t deter me. I'd done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn’t scare me as much as it used to.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“I also read about Heathcliff's unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book



“The course of true love rarely runs smooth.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“So you're going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can't shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“My father said it was a delightfully odd - and dangerously self-destructive - quirk of humans that we were far more interested in pointless trivia then in genuine news stories.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Truly competent Literary Detectives are as rare as truthful men, Mr. Tweed -- you can see her potential as clearly as I can. Frightened of someone stealing your thunder, perhaps?”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book



“Most of Mycroft's ideas were far too dangerous to even think about, much less let loose on a world unprepared for hyper-radical thought.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Mr McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“He said you were very dangerous."
"No more dangerous than anyone else who dares to speak the truth.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


“Are you married?
Yes, I mumbled, that is to say - no.
Come, come, said Havisham angrily. It is a simple enough question.
I was married, I answered.
Died?
No, I mumbled, that is to say - yes.
I'll try harder questions in future, announced Havisham, for you are obviously not adept at the easy ones.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book


About the author

Jasper Fforde
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“Nu de Brangien cea credincioasă, ci de ei însuși au a se teme iubiții. Însă cum să stea de veghe inimile lor bete de dragoste? Iubirea îi îmboldește, așa cum setea îl repede pe cerb către râu, la ananghie, ori tot așa precum, după o lungă înfometare, șoimul slobozit se lasă pe pradă. Vai! dragostea nu se poate tănui.”
― quote from The Romance of Tristan


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― Caitlin Kittredge, quote from The Iron Thorn


“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient


“And yet it had come to this: a cult that followed a dogmatic hard line of exclusion and repression, believed its teachings alone were the way that others must follow, and claimed special knowledge of something that had happened more than five centuries ago. It did nothing to soften its rigid stance, nothing to heal wounds that it had helped to create by deliberately shunning people of other Races, and nothing to explore the possibility of other beliefs. It held its ground even in the face of hard evidence that perhaps it had misjudged and refused to consider that it was courting a danger that might destroy everyone. p96”
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“The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not.”
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