Terry Pratchett Quotes - Page 6

All he had was nothing, but that was something, and now it had been taken away.

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet... and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.

He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity.

Ye mustn't be afraid to ask for help. Pride is a good thing, my girl, but it will kill you in time.

Everyone has gods. You just don't think they're gods.

That’s what being alive is, Thing! It’s being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

It’s bad enough barging into Guild property, but we’ll get into really serious trouble if we shoot anyone. Lord Vetinari won’t stop at sarcasm. He might use’ - Colon swallowed - ‘irony.

Anyway, it's like with bikes,' said the first speaker authoritatively. 'I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl's bike.''Well. You're a girl,' said one of the others.'That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.

Granny," said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their wayward elders. "I don't think you quite understand. I don't want to hit the ground. It's never done anything to me.

Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.

Yes, but nomes aren’t hard to make,” said Dorcas. “You just need other nomes.” “You’re weird.

Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?

A stink. A stench. A foulness in her mind, dreadful and unforgiving. A compost of horrible ideas and rotted thoughts that made her want to take our her brain and wash it.

The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.

If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged

Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.

Because the world all twisted up and wrong, like distorted glass, only came back into focus if you looked at it through the bottom of a bottle.

Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?” said Dibbler.“He says he can’t,” said Victor.Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. “Well,” he said, “I suppose he should know.

Haven’t you got any romance in your soul?’ said Magrat plaintively. ‘No,’ said Granny. 'I ain’t. And stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.

Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

Have a chocolate-covered raisin,” he said.“They look like rat droppings,” said the Chair.The Dean peered at them in the gloom.“So that’s it,” he said. “The bag fell on the floor a minute ago, and I thought there seemed rather a lot.

The sun set, which is everyday magic...

She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need. And, then again, sometimes she didn't. She was like that.

We ain’t going to curse anyone,” said Granny firmly. “It hardly ever works if they don’t know you’ve done it.

What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.

Dullness. Only humans could have invented it. What imaginations they had.

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort.IN PAIRS.

...Human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium...

There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!" But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.

A mirror can contain the reflection of the whole universe, a whole skyful of stars in a piece of silvered glass no thicker than a breath.

There’s no point in believing in things that exist.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

... it is to your credit that you recognize that if he was a monster then it was other monstrous things which made him so. The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer...

A voice said: One. One. One, two. One, two. Then the footsteps went back into the distance. After a while, another voice said: One, two, three, four- And the universe came into being. It was wrong to call it a big bang. That would just be noise, and all that noise could create is more noise and a cosmos full of random particles. Matter exploded into being, apparently as chaos, but in fact as a chord. The ultimate power chord. Everything, all together, streaming out in one huge rush that contained within itself, like reverse fossils, everything that it was going to be. And, zigzagging through the expanding cloud, alive, that first wild live music. This had shape. It had spin. It had rhythm. It had a beat, and you could dance to it. Everything did.

For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.

I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?''It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-''Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.''The state of the body is not-''Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.

Where's the pleasure in bein' the winner if the loser ain't alive to know they've lost?

The only thing more dangerous then a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency...

It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.

The dwarfs can turn lead into gold...It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.-Can we?-Damned if I know. I can't.-Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could.-Can you?-No!-Ah-ha!

No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

I hate cats."Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant."I SEE," he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat haters.

Preston, I don't think this creature could ever find its way into your head. Quite apart from anything else, it seems pretty crowded and complicated to me.

What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve that?

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.Death took a step backwards.It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features.Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?

I DON'T HOLD WITH CRUELTY TO CATS.

Mission motto, sir," said Carrot cheerfully. "Morituri Nolumus Mori. Rincewind suggested it.""I imagine he did," said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly. "And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind?""Er..." Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape. "Er... roughly speaking, it means, 'We who are about to die don't want to', sir.

She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need.

Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat.

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained in reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click, someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in six-part harmony, and perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage. Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

That's a nice song,' said young Sam, and Vimes remembered that he was hearing it for the first time. It's an old soldiers' song,' he said. Really, sarge? But it's about angels.' Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits. As I recall, they used to sing it after battles,’ he said. 'I've seen old men cry when they sing it,’ he added. Why? It sounds cheerful.' They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will.