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Jasper Fforde

English novelist

Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is an English-born Welsh novelist and aviator. He is the author of the popular Thursday Next series, as well as the Nursery Crime books.

Jasper Fforde in 2012

Quotes

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  • "Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."
    • Shades of Grey (2010), p. 206

Thursday Next

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The Eyre Affair (2001)

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All page numbers are from the trade paperback edition published by Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-200180-5, first printing
All italics as in the book
  • Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
    • Chapter 3, “Back at My Desk” (p. 18)
  • “It was a coincidence.”
    “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
    “Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”
    • Chapter 8, “Airship to Swindon” (p. 82)
  • Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just...well, differently moraled, that’s all.
    • Chapter 15, “Hello & Goodbye, Mr. Quaverley” (p. 157)
  • “James Crometty!” demanded Bowden. “Did you kill him?”
    “I kill a lot of people,” whispered Felix7. “I don’t remember names.”
    “You shot him six times in the face.”
    The dying killer smiled.
    “That I remember.”
    “Six times! Why?”
    Felix7 frowned and started to shiver.
    “Six was all I had,” he answered simply.
    • Chapter 16, “Sturmey Archer & Felix7” (p. 166)
  • “Haven’t I seen your face somewhere else?”
    “No, it’s always been right here on the front of my head.”
    • Chapter 26, “The Earthcrossers” (p. 248)
  • “It’s easy. A lobotomized monkey could do it.”
    “And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?”
    • Chapter 27, “Hades Finds Another Manuscript” (p. 275)
  • The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.
    • Chapter 32, “Thornfield Hall” (p. 318)
  • You’ve got a face longer than a Dickens novel.
    • Chapter 36, “Married” (p. 371)

Lost in a Good Book (2002)

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All page numbers are from the trade paperback edition published by Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-200403-0, first printing
All italics as in the 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.
    • Chapter 3, “Cardenio Unbound” (p. 35)
  • My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: they were merely that chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.”
    • Chapter 4, “Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Neanderthal” (pp. 48-49)
  • “He said you were very dangerous.”
    “No more dangerous than anyone else who dares to speak the truth.”
    • Chapter 5, “Vanishing Hitchhikers” (p. 60)
  • “We’re fine, Joff. You?”
    “Not that good, Thurs. The Church of the Global Standard Deity has undergone a split.”
    “No!” I said with his much surprise and concern in my voice as I could muster.
    “I’m afraid so. The new Global Standard Clockwise Deity have broken away due to unresolvable differences over the direction in which the collection plate is passed round.”
    “Another split? That’s the third this week!”
    “Fourth,” replied Joffy dourly, “and it’s only Tuesday. The Standardized pro-Baptist conjoined Methodarian-Lutherian sisters of something-or-other split into two subgroups yesterday. Soon,” he added grimly, “there won’t be enough ministers to man the splits.”
    • Chapter 6, “Family” (p. 81)
  • “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “it is my considered opinion that most coincidences are simply quirks of chance—if you extrapolate the bell curve of probability you will find statistical abnormalities that seem unusual but are, in actual fact, quite likely, given the amount of people on the planet and the amount of different things we do in our lives.”
    • Chapter 6, “Family” (p. 87)
  • Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.
    • Chapter 7, “White Horse, Uffington, Picnics, for the Use of” (p. 93)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 10, “A Lack of Differences” (p. 124)
  • “Do you know what the worst bit about dying is?”
    “Tell me, Gran.”
    “You never get to see how it all turns out.”
    • Chapter 11, “Granny Next” (p. 136)
  • Mr. McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature.
    • Chapter 11, “Granny Next” (p. 139)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 12, “At Home with My Memories” (p. 141)
  • “You’re crazy!”
    “Undoubtedly. But look around you. You followed me in here. Who’s crazier? The crazy or the crazy who follows him?”
    • Chapter 23, “Fun with Spike” (p. 262)
  • “Don’t believe this,” murmured Miss Havisham. “It’s all poppycock. Her majesty is a verb short of a sentence.”
    • Chapter 25, “Roll Call at Jurisfiction” (p. 289)
  • “I’ll tell you what love is,” I told her. “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!”
    • Chapter 29, “Rescued” (p. 350)
  • “And nothing can stop it?”
    “Nothing I know of,” he replied sadly. “The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really.”
    • Chapter 32, “The End of Life as We Know It” (p. 377)

The Well of Lost Plots (2003)

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All page numbers are from the trade paperback edition published by Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-303435-9, first printing
All italics as in the book
  • Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.
    • Chapter 5, “The Well of Lost Plots” (p. 48)
  • “Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,” replied Snell as we walked along. “The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer’s imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader’s mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer—perhaps more.”
    • Chapter 5, “The Well of Lost Plots” (p. 48)
  • “Books”—Snell smiled—“are a kind of magic.”
    • Chapter 5, “The Well of Lost Plots” (p. 49)
  • The atmosphere in the room was so thick with dramatic clichés you could have cut it with a knife.
    • Chapter 5, “The Well of Lost Plots” (p. 55)
  • Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception.
    • Chapter 9, “Apples Benedict, a Hedgehog and Commander Bradshaw” (p. 97)
  • The leader was identified by his dental records—why he had them on him, no one was quite sure.
    • Chapter 14, “Educating the Generics” (p. 136)
  • Preservation without expenditure is worthless.
    • Chapter 16, “Captain Nemo” (p. 157)
  • Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.
    • Chapter 23, “Jurisfiction Session No. 40320” (p. 255)
  • Tyrants are all the same—shocking temper when they don’t get their own way!
    • Chapter 29, “Mrs. Bradshaw and Solomon (Judgments) Inc.” (p. 306)
  • No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.
    • Chapter 34, “Loose Ends” (pp. 354-355)

Something Rotten (2004)

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All page numbers are from the trade paperback edition published by Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-303541-X, 2nd printing
All italics as in the book
  • Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about.
    • Chapter 2, “No Place Like Home” (p. 21)
  • “’Tis very strange!” he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. “It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice of all that I witness!”
    “You’re going to have to speak English out here.”
    “All this,” explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, “would take millions of words to describe correctly!”
    “You’re right. It would. That’s the magic of the book imagino-transference technology,” I told him. “A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.”
    “The reader? What’s it got to do with him?”
    “Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author’s description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they’ve met, read or seen before—far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader’s experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.”
    • Chapter 2, “No Place Like Home” (p. 21)
  • Good evening and welcome to Evade the Question Time, the nation’s premier topical talk show. Tonight, as every night, a panel of distinguished public figures generally evade answering the audience’s questions and instead toe the party line.
    • Chapter 3, “Evade the Question Time” (p. 47)
  • Money had never been a problem in the Book World. All the details of life were taken care of by something called Narrative Assumption. A reader would assume you had gone shopping, or gone to the toilet, or brushed your hair, so a writer never needed to outline it.
    • Chapter 5, “Ham(let) and Cheese” (pp. 72-73)
  • If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction—and ultimately, without a major resolution.
    • Chapter 5, “Ham(let) and Cheese” (p. 76)
  • My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offense—which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straightaway.
    • Chapter 8, “Time Waits for No Man” (pp. 96-97)
  • “Look here, St. Zvlkx,” said Volescamper as they walked towards the marquee for tea and scones, “what was the thirteenth century like?”
    “The Mayor wants to know what the thirteenth century was like—and no lip, sunshine.”
    “Filthy, damp, disease-ridden and pestilential.”
    “He said it was like London, Your Grace.”
    • Chapter 11, “The Greatness of St. Zvlkx” (pp. 124-125; in the book, the second and third lines of this quote are set in Fraktur).
  • “Humans are molded by evolution to be short-termists, Miss Next,” he continued. His voice rumbled deeply and seemed to echo inside my head. “We need only to see our children to reproductive age to be successful in a biological sense. We have to move beyond that. If we see ourselves as residents on this planet for the long term, we need to plan for the long term.”
    • Chapter 15, “Meeting the CEO” (p. 148)
  • Whatever. As far as I can see, there is one state of dead and that’s ‘not living.’ Now, do you have anything useful to add to this investigation or not?”
    • Chapter 27, “Weird Shit on the M4” (p. 238)
  • For centuries I’ve been worrying about audiences seeing me as a mouthy spoiled brat who can’t make up his mind about anything, but, having seen the real world, I can understand the appeal. My play is popular because my failings are your failings, my indecision the indecision of you all. We all know what has to be done; it’s just that sometimes we don’t know how to get there. Acting without thought doesn’t really help in the long run. I might dither for a while, but at least I make the right decision in the end: I bear my troubles and take arms against them. And thereby lies a message for all mankind, although I’m not exactly sure what it is. Perhaps there’s no message. I don’t really know. Besides, if I don’t dither, there’s no play.
    • Chapter 43, “Recovery” (pp. 371-372)

First Among Sequels (2007)

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All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Viking Books, ISBN 978-0-670-03871-8, 1st printing
All italics as in the book
  • The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in the The Owl that Morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (p. 1; opening paragraph)
  • “The stupidity surplus,” repeated Landen as he sat down at the kitchen table, “I’m all for responsible government, but storing it up like this is bound to cause problems sooner or later—even by acting sensibly, the government has shown itself to be a bunch of idiots.”
    “There are a lot of idiots in this country,” I replied absently, “and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (p. 2)
  • How about this for a title: Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth—Just Deal with It.
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (p. 3)
  • “Tell them ballocks.”
    “They’ll pay me five hundred guineas.”
    “Cancel the ballocks thing—tell them you’ll be honored and overjoyed.”
    “It’s a sellout. I don’t do sellouts. Not for that price anyway.”
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (p. 6)
  • The first four in the series had been less a lighthearted chronicling of my adventures and more of a “Dirty Harry meets Fanny Hill,” but with a good deal more sex and violence.
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (p. 7)
  • “Oh!” said Landen, reading a letter. “A rejection from my publisher. They didn’t think Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again was what they had in mind for self-help.”
    “I guess their target audience doesn’t include dead people.”
    “You could be right.”
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (p. 7)
  • “How is the book going?” I asked returning to my knitting.
    “The self-help stuff?”
    “The magnum opus.”
    Landen looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “More opus than magnum. I’m trying to figure out whether the lack of progress is writer’s block, procrastination, idleness or just plain incompetence.”
    • Chapter 1, “Breakfast” (pp. 8-9)
  • I just had an idea for a cheap form of power: by bringing pasta and antipasta together, we could be looking at the utter annihilation of ravioli and liberation of vast quantities of energy.
    • Chapter 2, “Mum and Polly and Mycroft” (p. 18)
  • “I am surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!”
    “I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?”
    I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this.
    • Chapter 2, “Mum and Polly and Mycroft” (p. 19)
  • “Dead,” muttered Mycroft with a resigned air. “Never been that before. Not even once. Are you quite sure?”
    • Chapter 2, “Mum and Polly and Mycroft” (p. 19)
  • “Incredibly enough, reality TV has just gotten worse.”
    “Is that possible? I asked. “Wasn’t Celebrity Trainee Pathologist the pits?” I thought for a moment. “Actually, Whose Life Support Do We Switch Off? was worse. Or maybe Sell Your Granny. Wow, the choice these days makes it also tricky to decide.
    Bowden laughed.
    “I’ll agree that Granny lowered the bar for distasteful program makers everywhere, but RTA-TV, never one to shrink from a challenge, has devised Samaritan Kidney Swap. Ten renal-failure patients take turns trying to convince a tissue-typed donor—and the voting viewers—which one should have his spare kidney.”
    I groaned. Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment—the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.
    • Chapter 3, “Acme Carpets” (pp. 26-27)
  • “Listen to what it says in the horoscopes: ‘If it is your birthday, there may be an increased amount of mail. Expect gifts, friendly salutations from people and the occasional surprise. Possibility of cake.’ That’s so weird—I wonder if any of it will come true?”
    • Chapter 5, “Training Day” (p. 48)
  • I’d come to realize over the years that anything created by mankind had error, mischief and bureaucratic officialdom hardwired at inception, and the fictional world was no different.
    • Chapter 6, “The Great Library and the Council of Genres” (p. 54)
  • “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.
    • Chapter 11, “The Refit” (pp. 90-91)
  • But his hits were greater than the sum of his misses, and such is the way with greatness.
    • Chapter 11, “The Refit” (p. 97)
  • Noting with dismay that most cross-religion bickering occurred only because all the major religions were convinced that they were the right one and every other religion was the wrong one, the founders of the Global Standard Deity based their fledgling “portmanteau” faith on the premise that most religions want the same thing once all the shameless, manipulative power play had been subtracted: peace, stability, equality and justice—the same as the nonfaiths. As soon as they found that centralizing thread that unites all people and makes a dialogue of sorts with a Being of Supreme Moral Authority mostly optional, the GSD flourished.
    • Chapter 15, “Home Again” (p. 125)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 15, “Home Again” (p. 128)
  • You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism.
    • Chapter 20, “The Austen Rover” (p. 162)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 29, “Time Out of Joint” (p. 259; “SHE” is an acronym for “Standard History Eventline”)
  • 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.”
    • Chapter 30, “Now Is the Winter” (p. 264)
  • 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.”
    • Chapter 31, “Spending the Surplus” (p. 268)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 31, “Spending the Surplus” (p. 274)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 33, “Somewhere Else Entirely” (p. 286)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 33, “Somewhere Else Entirely” (p. 303)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 36, “Senator Jobsworth” (p. 330)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 38, “The End of Time” (p. 350)

One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011)

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All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Viking Books, ISBN 978-0-670-02252-6, 1st printing
Italics and grammatical solecisms as in the book
  • 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.
    • Chapter 1, “The BookWorld Remade” (p. 13)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 2, “A Woman Named Thursday Next” (p. 20)
  • I didn’t know much about Conspiracy, but I did know that its theorists were mostly paranoid and tended to value conviction above evidence.
    • Chapter 5, “Sprockett” (pp. 46-47)
  • To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise.
    • Chapter 12, “Jurisfiction” (p. 124)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 19, “JurisTech, Inc.” (p. 172)
  • “It’s highly disorderly,” he explained, “not like here. There is no easily definable plot, and you can run yourself ragged wondering what the significance can be of a chance encounter. You’ll also find that for the most part there is no shorthand to the narrative, so everything happens in a long and painfully drawn out sequence. Apparently the talk can be confusing—for the most part, people just say the first thing that comes into their heads.”
    “Is it as bad as they say it is?”
    “I’ve heard it’s worse. Here in the BookWorld, we say what needs to be said for the story to proceed. Out there? Well, you can discount at least eighty percent of chat as just meaningless drivel.”
    “I never thought the percentage was that high.”
    “In some individuals it can be as high as ninety-two percent. The people to listen to are the ones who don’t say very much.”
    • Chapter 19, “JurisTech, Inc.” (p. 179)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 20, “Alive!” (p. 186)
  • 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?
    • Chapter 20, “Alive!” (p. 189)
  • “Did she believe you?”
    “She’s an excellent journalist—of course not.”
    • Chapter 21, “Landen Parke-Laine” (p. 205)
  • 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.”
    • Chapter 21, “Landen Parke-Laine” (p. 205)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 28, “Home Again” (p. 249)
  • The idea that people actually do this because they like it strikes me as double insanity with added insanity.
    • Chapter 39, “Story-Ending Options” (p. 339)
  • Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?”
    I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.
    “Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”
    • Chapter 41, “The End of Book” (p. 359)

The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012)

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All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Viking Books, ISBN 978-0-670-02502-2, 1st printing
Italics as in the book
  • 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?
    • Chapter 1, “Monday: Swindon” (p. 1)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 1, “Monday: Swindon” (p. 9)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 7, “Monday: Tuesday” (p. 60)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 7, “Monday: Tuesday” (p. 63)
  • “Do I have to talk to insane people?”
    “You’re a librarian now. I’m afraid it’s mandatory.”
    • Chapter 22, “Wednesday: Library” (p. 179)
  • I don’t think God has any more idea than you or I about what’s going on.
    • Chapter 35, “Thursday: Evening” (p. 298)
  • “Think of it this way: A single brain cell has no intelligence, but in company it can do extraordinary things. Perhaps the entirety of existence is the true, unifying intelligence that drives what occurs—for a reason that is quite beyond our understanding, or even to a higher plane where the concept of understanding is laughably redundant.”
    It was an interesting concept. Mycroft had often theorized that the whole of existence was so large and hideously complex that it must be sentient. And if this were so, then it must have a truly warped sense of humor and have an abiding love of math and hydrogen—and a deep loathing for order.
    • Chapter 35, “Thursday: Evening” (p. 298)

Early Riser (2018)

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All page numbers are from the hardcover first American edition published by Viking Books, ISBN 978-0-670-02503-9, 1st printing
Italics as in the book
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 2, “Fat Thursday” (p. 7)
  • It would have been easy to dislike her intensely, but I actually felt nothing for her at all.
    • Chapter 2, “Fat Thursday” (p. 8)
  • “What do you think?”
    “I can hardly contain my indifference.”
    • Chapter 2, “Fat Thursday” (p. 8)
  • “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?”
    • Chapter 8, “Meet Aurora” (p. 62)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 8, “Meet Aurora” (pp. 63-64)
  • 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.”
    • Chapter 11, “Talgarth and HiberTech” (p. 89)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 12, “The Wincarnis” (p. 104)
  • “I’ll be honest,” I said, “I have nothing against anyone who believes, but I think it’s a dangerous nonsense.”
    • Chapter 12, “The Wincarnis” (p. 105)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 12, “The Wincarnis” (p. 106)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 13, “Consulate and Fodder” (p. 114)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 13, “Consulate and Fodder” (p. 116)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 13, “Consulate and Fodder” (p. 117)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 21, “The Wincarnis” (p. 186)
  • “Last season we had the Reduced Shakespeare Company doing ‘Highlights of the Mostly Complete History of Condensing Stuff (abridged)’.”
    • Chapter 22, “The Consulate” (p. 192)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 24, “HiberTech” (pp. 216-217)
  • 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.
    • Chapter 33, “Jonesy” (p. 284)
  • “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.”
    • Chapter 33, “Jonesy” (p. 285)
  • “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” he said, “it’s what everyone believes that’s important.”
    • Chapter 35, “Dreamspace” (p. 299)
  • People die in the Winter; it’s what it’s there for.
    • Chapter 39, “H4S Radar” (p. 332)
  • I’d been so convinced of that particular narrative I never for one moment stopped to reappraise the situation.
    • Chapter 42, “Night in the Museum” (p. 350)
  • “How is that working out?” I asked.
    “Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive.”
    • Chapter 42, “Night in the Museum” (p. 353)
  • “Oh, hullo, Worthing,” he said in a cheery manner. “How are things?”
    “Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass.”
    • Chapter 42, “Night in the Museum” (p. 354)
  • You’ll know the beginning easily enough; it’s when it all started going weird.
    • Chapter 42, “Night in the Museum” (p. 355)
  • The numbers were too great for HiberTech to hide what had happened. As it was, well-engineered corporate surprise, orchestrated bafflement, faux delight, suitable soul-searching and feigned contrition won the day.
    • Chapter 47, “The Awakening” (p. 395)
  • Winter isn’t a season – it’s a calling.
    • Chapter 47, “The Awakening” (p. 400)
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