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Jasper Fforde
114 quotes
“What’s in Hangar One at the moment?” I asked the driver. “The Magus.” “Still?” Even the biggest refit never took more than a week, and John Fowles’s labyrinthine-plotted masterpiece had been in there nearly five. “It’s taking longer than we thought—they removed all the plot elements for cleaning, and no one can remember how they go back together again.” “I’m not sure it will make a difference,” I murmured as we pulled up outside Hangar Eight.”
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“But his hits were greater than the sum of his misses, and such is the way with greatness.”
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“How is the faith-unification business?” “We’ve nearly got everyone,” said Joffy with a smile. “The atheists came on board last week. Once we had suggested that ‘god’ could be a set of essentially beneficent physical rules of the cosmos, they were only too happy to join. In fact, apart from a few scattered remnants of faith leaders who can’t quite come to terms with the loss of their power, influence and associated funny hats, it’s all looking pretty good.”
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“You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism.”
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“Friday may have tricked his parents, the SHE and half the ChronoGuard, but there’s one person no teenage boy ever managed to fool.” “And that is?” “His younger sister.”
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“Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain latitude across the nation?” “Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.” “Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end.”
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“The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Service should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out—and that journey starts now.”
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“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” said Webastow, looking over his glasses, “but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere.” “Thank you very much,” replied Ms. Yogert courteously. “I’ll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Post.”
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“A third faction who called them selves “simplists” argued that there was a single fundamental rule the governed all story: if it works, it works.”
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“Rescue seemed a very remote possibility, and that was at the nub of the whole ethical-dilemma argument. You never come out on top, no matter what. The only way to win the game is not to play.”
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“I need to get home and have a long, hot bath and then a martini.” Thursday5 thought for a moment. “After you’ve drunk the long, hot bath,” she observed, “you’ll never have room for the martini.”
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“The ChronoGuard has shut itself down, and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically and theoretically…impossible.” “Good thing, too,” replied Landen. “It always made my head ache. In fact I was thinking of doing a self-help book for SF novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don’t.”
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“About ten degrees upslope of Fiction, I could see our nearest neighbor: Artistic Criticism. It was an exceptionally beautiful island, yet deeply troubled, confused and suffused with a blanketing layer of almost impenetrable bullshit.”
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“To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.”
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“I didn’t know much about Conspiracy, but I did know that its theorists were mostly paranoid and tended to value conviction above evidence.”
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“To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise.”
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“The good thing about being in the BookWorld is that we aren’t hampered by anything as awkward as physical laws. The RealWorld must be hideously annoying to do science in.”
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“Bipedal movement is the skill of controlled falling,” said Square. “If it weren’t so commonplace, it would seem miraculous—like much out here, to be truthful.”
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“Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially, they’re all the same and reading from the same rule book. To get along you have to appreciate the rules, but also know that other people know the rules—and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?”
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“Did she believe you?” “She’s an excellent journalist—of course not.”
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“Mrs. Next came back into the room. “You never told me you’d bought a gold-plated toilet.” Landen frowned. “We don’t have a gold-plated toilet.” “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Next. I think I’ve just peed in your tuba.”
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“Why didn’t he say so directly?” asked Sprockett, not unreasonably. “This is Fiction,” I explained. “The exigency of drama requires events to be clouded in ambiguity.”
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“The idea that people actually do this because they like it strikes me as double insanity with added insanity.”
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“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?”
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“Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback.”
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“Having to mix with dimwits is hideously boring. Great-Uncle Mycroft put it best when he said that for a genius this planet is excruciatingly dull, only made briefly more illuminating when another genius happens along.”
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“It’s simply part of wider research on a neural expansifier that increases the synaptic pathways in the brain. Aside from repairing traumatic damage and reversing the effects of dementia, it can potentially make dumb people smart.” “I’m trying hard, but I’m not sure I can think of a more useful invention.”
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“Do I have to talk to insane people?” “You’re a librarian now. I’m afraid it’s mandatory.”
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“I don’t think God has any more idea than you or I about what’s going on.”
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“I always really admired you growing up. Always smiling through your unhappiness. A real inspiration.” “I wasn’t unhappy.” “You looked unhappy.” “Looks can be deceptive.” “All too true,” she said, “but I meant what I said: inspirational in a sort of tragic way, like you were the failure in the family, but always looked on the bright side of everything.” “You’re very kind,” I said, long used to Megan’s ways, “but it could have been much worse: I could have been born without tact or empathy, and be shallow, self-absorbed and hideously patronizing.”
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“It would have been easy to dislike her intensely, but I actually felt nothing for her at all.”
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“What do you think?” “I can hardly contain my indifference.”
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“Jealous?” she said. “Of what you have to offer? A second-rate Consul and a third-rate vaudeville act peddling fourth-rate advice to a fifth-rate Novice?”
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“You need to delay the train.” “How do I do that?” “Your head on the rails?” “Seriously?” “I don’t know. But put it this way: if you don’t delay the train, I will punch you five times hard in the head.” “Once would probably be enough as a punishment.” “You don’t need to be punished, you need motivating. And not getting punched five times is a terrific motivator. Take my word for it.”
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“More welcoming were a couple of Welsh Tourist Board posters. One was advertising the local area with the now-universal slogan “Visit Wales – Not Always Raining.”
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“Passing through?” “Yes; here to meet with Moody.” “You’ll get more sense from lichen. What’s with your head?” Unlike talking to The Notable Goodnight, where I needed to be polite, this was an answer I could have fun with. “It’s the final stages of an excruciatingly painful and incurable genital wasting disease. Luckily, it’s only spread by skin contact. Sorry, I should’ve said that before I shook your hand. Remiss of me – apologies.” Shamanic Bob smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “I think I deserved that.” “Yes, I think you did.”
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“I’ll be honest,” I said, “I have nothing against anyone who believes, but I think it’s a dangerous nonsense.”
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“If you’ve not dreamed, you’ve never truly slept. Dreams are the place where you can be yourself; do anything, be anything. The mind set free.”
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“She can’t be that volatile.” “She punched me in the eye so hard she detached my retina,” he said, “and all I did was place the preposition at the end of the sentence.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“Last season we had the Reduced Shakespeare Company doing ‘Highlights of the Mostly Complete History of Condensing Stuff (abridged)’.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” he said, “it’s what everyone believes that’s important.”
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“People die in the Winter; it’s what it’s there for.”
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“I’d been so convinced of that particular narrative I never for one moment stopped to reappraise the situation.”
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“How is that working out?” I asked. “Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive.”
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