“’Tis very strange!” he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. “It would take a… — Jasper Fforde
“’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.”
p. 21Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
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?”
p. 238
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.
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.
p. 96
