Top 200 Jasper Fforde Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I am boring, but I’m ok with it. I’m the anchor, the shoulder... I’m an average man... with a truly extraordinary wife.”

— Jasper Fforde

102. “I found Jane, too, or perhaps she found me. It doesn’t really matter. We found each other. And although she was Grey and I was Red, we shared a common thirst for justice that transcended Chromatic politics. I loved her, and what’s more, I was beginning to think that she loved me. After all, she did apologize before she pushed me into the leafless expanse below the spread of the yateveo, and she wouldn’t have done that if she’d felt nothing.”

— Jasper Fforde

103. “The very possibility of death focuses the mind wonderfully.”

— Jasper Fforde

104. “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

105. “A sloppy half-Windsor is the first symptom of serial indolence’ she replied in the patronizing voice that Yellows reserved for Rule-breakers, ’and ignoring the infraction gives the impression that it is acceptable to be inappropriately attired. The next day it might be badly polished shoes, then uncouth language, showing off and impoliteness. Before one knows it, the rot of disharmony would start to dismantle everything that we know and cherish.”

— Jasper Fforde

106. “I shouldn’t believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.”

— Jasper Fforde

107. “To avoid a repeat of this near disaster, the Council of Genres took the only course of action open to them to ensure TGC would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it.”

— Jasper Fforde

108. “Our notions of self-determination are, on the whole, something of a myth. We are governed almost exclusively by our own peculiar habits, which makes those who rail against them that much more remarkable.”

— Jasper Fforde

109. “2.5.03.02.005: Generally speaking, if you fiddle with something, it will break. Don’t.”

— Jasper Fforde

110. “If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.”

— Jasper Fforde

111. “We try to make art perfect because we never manage it in real life.”

— Jasper Fforde

112. “One was our own Mother Fallopia, tall, elegant, austere, and with a habit so black she looked like a nun-shaped hole in the air.”

— Jasper Fforde

113. “Troll Wars were like Batman movies: both were repeated at regular intervals, featured expensive hardware, and were broadly predictable.”

— Jasper Fforde

114. “He’s not as bad as everyone makes out. He might buy venerable old companies and strip their assets, causing numerous layoffs and the odd corporate suicide or two, but that’s business. Inside, he’s a big teddy bear.”

— Jasper Fforde

115. “It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent – it took me that long to start writing good.”

— Jasper Fforde

116. “For an author just starting out, you’ve got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.”

— Jasper Fforde

117. “Every book should have a romance.”

— Jasper Fforde

Featured in: Romance Quotes

118. “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

119. “The only thing you really get to figure out after a lifetime of study is that there’s more stuff to figure out. Frustrating and enlightening at the same time.”

— Jasper Fforde

120. “Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.”

— Jasper Fforde

121. “It was one of those British phrases, along with ‘May I help you?’, that can be either exceedingly polite or hugely aggressive.”

— Jasper Fforde

122. “By spiritually I merely mean that I feel I have good in my soul and am inclined to follow the correct course of action given a prescribed set of circumstances.”

— Jasper Fforde

123. “Punching goblins, replied Sprockett soothingly, while offering short-term relief, has no long-term beneficial value.”

— Jasper Fforde

124. “Death and the end of one’s life are two very different things indeed.”

— Jasper Fforde

125. “We’re all something we’re not,′ he said. ‘Every one of us is stuck between the person we want to be and the person we can be. And there doesn’t have to be a why. All things have to do is feel right.”

— Jasper Fforde

126. “Tangling with the Goliath Corporation generally left you in one of two places: inside a wooden box with a grieving family outside, or inside a wooden box under six foot of soil with family wondering where you were. The former was if they didn’t hold a grudge.”

— Jasper Fforde

127. “We require only a grenade launcher, six pounds of industrial-strength licorice, two spells of Class VIII complexity, a shipping container, a side of bacon, an automobile, several homing snails, a ladder, and two people to act as bait.”

— Jasper Fforde

128. “People who read my books have an open mind when it comes to new, bizarre, interesting and exciting ideas.”

— Jasper Fforde

129. “A good butler should save his employer’s life at least once a day.”

— Jasper Fforde

130. “I loved him, officer. More than any woman ever loved an egg.”

— Jasper Fforde

131. “I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.”

— Jasper Fforde

132. “Strive for the Long Now.”

— Jasper Fforde

133. “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

134. “Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.”

— Jasper Fforde

135. “The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil.”

— Jasper Fforde

136. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

137. “It was loopholery at its very best.”

— Jasper Fforde

138. “And he gave me a smile that looked as though it had come from a hastily-read handbook on cultivating personal charm.”

— Jasper Fforde

139. “Social mores change with time, like fashion – who knows where it might all end up? I especially like the idea that waste, impoliteness and overpopulation become “abominations,” although I’m not sure recycling one’s aunt will ever truly catch on.”

— Jasper Fforde

140. “Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.”

— Jasper Fforde

141. “I was glad to see I had only witnessed Dad’s death and not the end of his life, as the two I learned are barely related at all.”

— Jasper Fforde

142. “She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive.”

— Jasper Fforde

143. “You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library. She pointed to the shelf opposite. Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.”

— Jasper Fforde

144. “Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.”

— Jasper Fforde

145. “Working with those versed in the Mystical Arts was sometimes like trying to knit with wet spaghetti: just when you thought you’d gotten somewhere, it all came to pieces in your hands.”

— Jasper Fforde

146. “If you want your fridge-freezer and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this.”

— Jasper Fforde

147. “There is a certain degree of steampunkishness that creeps into my books.”

— Jasper Fforde

148. “The government was to raise the duty on cheese to 83 percent, an unpopular move that would doubtless have the more militant citizens picketing cheese shops.”

— Jasper Fforde

149. “Stay close, do what I say and make as many mistakes as you want – just never the same one twice.”

— Jasper Fforde

150. “Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.”

— Jasper Fforde