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"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence."
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"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."

"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."

"Although profanity is part of our language that we speak everyday, it can simultaneity be used as a weapon to demoralize other people if it is offensive within its meaning."

"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."

"English is not merely a language anymore, it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world."

"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."
Explore more quotes by Jasper Fforde

"PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done.And it's our job to stop them."

"Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it."

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

"Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index."

"I'm beginning to think you're the sort of person who does a great deal with very little."He meant a liar."

"There is no point in expending good money on the pursuit of an engine that can power aircraft without propellers. What is wrong with airships anyway? They have borne mankind aloft for over a hundred relatively accident-free years and I see no reason to impugn their popularity..."

"All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn't so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause."

"I was in '78 recently," he announced. "I brought you this."He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title."Didn't they split in '70?""Not always. How are things?"
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