Terry Pratchett Quotes - Page 11

Witches are naturally nosy,” said Miss Tick, standing up. “Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.”“Will it cost me anything?”“What? I just said it was free!” said Miss Tick.“Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,” said Tiffany.Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said, “Are you listening?”“Yes,” said Tiffany.“Good. Now...if you trust in yourself...”“Yes?”“...and believe in your dreams...”“Yes?”“...and follow your star...” Miss Tick went on.“Yes?”“...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.

William groaned. It was Vimes. Worse, he was smiling, in a humourless predatory way."Ah, Mr de Worde," he said, stepping inside. "There are several thousand dogs stampeding through the city at the moment. This is an interesting fact, isn't it?"He leaned against the wall and produced a cigar. "Well, I say dogs," he said, striking a match on Goodmountain's helmet. "Mostly dogs, perhaps I should say. Some cats. More cats now, in fact, 'cos, hah, there's nothing like a, yes, a tidal wave of dogs, fighting and biting and howling, to sort of, how can I put it, give a city a certain . . . busyness. Especially underfoot,because - did I mention it? -they're very nervous dogs too. Oh, and did I mention cattle?" he went on, conversationally. "You know how it is, market day and so on, people are driving the cows and, my goodness, around the corner comes a wall of wailing dogs . . . Oh, and I forgot about the sheep. And the chickens, although I imagine there's not much left of the chickens now.

The Dean leaned toward an ear.“I was saying,” he said loudly, “that we didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘sex’ when we were young.”“That’s true. That’s very true,” said Poons. He stared reflectively at the flames. “Did we ever, mm, find out, do you remember?

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining on mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.

It's always worrying to see a journalist take a sudden interest in what you're saying, especially when you half suspect it was a load of pigeon guano.

You couldn't escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat.

where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.

What some people need," said Magrat, to the world in general, "is a bit more heart.""What some people need," said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, "is a lot more brain."Then she clutched at her hat to stop the wind from blowing i

You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just . . . is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.

I'VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND.

Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

He'd never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom tended to explode in your face. Just when he thought he'd found it he'd be suddenly involved in what he supposed other people - thoughtless, feckless people - would call an adventure. And he'd be forced to visit many strange lands and meet exotic and colourful people, although not for very long because usually he'd be running. He'd seen the creation of the universe, although not from a good seat, and had visited Hell and the afterlife. He'd been captured, imprisoned, rescued, lost and marooned. Sometimes it had all happened on the same day.

A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.

...Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was...

Heroes get kingdoms and princesses, and they take regular exercise, and when they smile the light glints off their teeth, ting

Witches just aren’t like that,” said Magrat. “We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead."The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration. She blushed, although not greenly, and looked at her knees.“Goodie Whemper did a recipe,” she confessed. “It’s quite easy. What you do is, you get some lead, and you—”“I don’t think that would be appropriate,” said Granny carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. “It could give people the wrong idea.”“But not for long,” said Nanny wistfully.

Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn’t do good for people, she did right by them.

But is all this true?" said Brutha.Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.""You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha."I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example.""And what do they think? Against it, are they?""It is not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.""Nope.""Pardon?"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.""It's a lot more complicated than that--""No it ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.""Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes-""But they Starts with thinking about people as things…

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.

Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.

Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief …

You trust him?" he said. "No," said Hastur. "Right," said Ligur. It's be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.

Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.

Afterward, there was that long, crowded pause in which everyone decides that although they are very shaken, and possibly upside down, they are, to their surprise, still alive.

Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad.

History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.

And then there were cats, thought Dog. He'd surprised the huge ginger cat from next door and had attempted to reduce it to cowering jelly by means of the usual glowing stare and deep-throated growl, which had always worked on the damned in the past. This time they had earned him a whack on the nose that had made his eyes water. Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls. He was looking forward to a further cat experiment, which he planned would consist of jumping around and yapping excitedly at it. It was a long shot, but it just might work.

If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander.

Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.

Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?

Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict. city', he recovered.

It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

Gossiping's part of witchcraft,' said Tiffany. 'They're checking to see if they've gone batty yet.

Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sargent Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.

As if one tiny choice by someone unimportant could make that much difference! History had to be a bit tougher than that. It all sprang back eventually, didn't it? He was sure he'd read something about that, somewhere. If it wasn't like that, no one would ever dare do anything.

People said that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but it wasn't true. There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the incorrigibly lawless.

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

She wore so much thick white makeup in order to conceal her naturally rosy complexion that if she turned around suddenly her face would probably end up on the back of her head.

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.

Aargh! I’m too short for this shit!

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no cap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. presumably, he said, these must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plan to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.

You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree."One of the giants grinned at him.Druellae snorted. "Stupid! Where do you think acorns come from?

He wanted one drink, and understood precisely why he wasn't going to have one. One drink ended up arriving in a dozen glasses.

Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.

The boldest of the three (thieves) moved suddenly, grabbed Angua and pulled her upright. "We walk out of here unharmed or the girl gets it, all right?" he snarled. Someone sniggered. "I hope you're not going to kill anyone," said Carrot."That's up to us!""Sorry, was I talking to you?" said Carrot. "Don't worry, I'll be fine," said Angua. She looked around to make sure Cheery wasn't there and then sighed."Come on, gentlemen, let's get this over with.""Don't play with your food!" said a voice from the crowd.There were one or two giggles until Carrot turned in his seat, whereupon everyone was suddenly intensely interested in their drinks."It's OK," said Angua quietly.Aware that something was off kilter, but not quite sure what it was, the thieves edged back to the door. No one moved as they unbolted it and, still holding Angua, stepped out into the fog, shutting the door behind them. "Hadn't we better help," said a constable who was new to the Watch. "They don't deserve help," said Vimes. there was a clank of armor and then a long, deep growl, right outside in the street. And a scream and then another scream. and a third scream modulated with "NONONOnonononononoNO!...aarghaarghaargh!" Something heavy hit the door.

(About sweeping)....What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.