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

“I have a subconscious list of rules for how reality should work. I did not develop these rules on purpose, and most of them don’t make sense – which is disturbing when you consider that they are an attempt to govern the behavior of reality – but they exist, and they play a large role in determining how I react to the things that happen to me. Large enough that a majority of the feelings I feel are simply a reaction to reality not complying with my arbitrary set of rules. Reality doesn’t give a shit about my rules, and this upsets me.”
― Allie Brosh, quote from Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened


“I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”
― Anne Lamott, quote from Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith


“Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.
Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable.
... ...
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way : the publicity images steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. (P. 128)”
― John Berger, quote from Ways of Seeing


“Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.”
― Greg Iles, quote from The Quiet Game


“Baby?” he called and he felt her eyes on him.
“Yeah?” she replied, her sweet voice soft, another tone he was getting used to and this was because the last couple of days it had started to come at him often.
“Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“In a second, I’m gonna pull over, get out my gun and give it to you. When I do, shoot me with it.”
“What?” she whispered.
“I’m facin’ another hour and a half of your music. I’d rather be dead.”
Silence then, “Shut up.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Lady Luck


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