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
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts


“The right rumour in the right ears can kill the emperor, as they say.”
― Trudi Canavan, quote from The Magician's Apprentice


“Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't know they are connected.”
― Mary E. Pearson, quote from The Adoration of Jenna Fox


“Hepimiz, az çok umut etmekte diretiyoruz.”
― Dino Buzzati, quote from The Tartar Steppe


“I didn't think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole


Interesting books

Cards on the Table
(25.2K)
Cards on the Table
by Agatha Christie
Washington's Crossing
(11.8K)
Washington's Crossin...
by David Hackett Fischer
Release Me
(68.1K)
Release Me
by J. Kenner
The Face of Another
(2.5K)
The Face of Another
by Kōbō Abe
My Unexpected Forever
(16.5K)
My Unexpected Foreve...
by Heidi McLaughlin
Sixteenth Summer
(8.8K)

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.