Top 1451 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Pratchett - Page 23

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).

Several sellers of hot meat pies and sausages in a bun had appeared from nowhere and were doing a brisk trade. [Footnote: They always do, everywhere. No-one sees them arrive. The logical explaination is that the franchise includes the stall, the paper hat and a small gas-powered time machine.]

This time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

You just put that sword away, sir, please," said the voice of Lance-Constable Vimes. "You will not shoot me, you young idiot. That would be murder," said the captain calmly. "Not where I'm aiming, sir.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

As far as Death was aware, the sole reason for any human association with pigs and lambs was as a prelude to chops and sausages. Quite why they should dress up for children’s wallpaper as well was a mystery. Hello, little folk, this is what you’re going to eat… He felt that if only he could find the key to it, he’d know a lot more about human beings.

Smaller-than-Medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

- DON’T WORRY, IT WON’T BE FOREVER. - Good. - IT MAY SEEM LIKE FOREVER.

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.

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

Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!

Mr Lipwig, there's a lady in the hall to see you and we've thanked her for not smoking three times and she's still doing it!

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

I think," he said, "I think, if you want thousands, you have to fight for one.

Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.

Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go.

There will be justice," said Brutha. "If there is no justice, there is nothing.

The pamphlet was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult, and I decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces that I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.

As a species, we are forever sticking our finger into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next.

It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.

Mort was hurt by this. It was one thing not to want to marry someone, but quite another to be told they didn't want to marry you.

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.

I ushered souls into the next world. I was the grave of all hope. I was the ultimate reality. I was the assassin against whom no lock would hold. - "Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?"

Another priest said,"Is it true you've said you'll believe in any god whose existence can be proved by logical debate?""Yes."Vimes had a feeling about the immediate future and took a few steps away from Dorfl."But the gods plainly do exist," said a priest."It Is Not Evident."A bolt of lightning lanced down through the clouds and hit Dorfl's helmet. There was a sheet of flame and then a trickling noise. Dorfl's molten armour formed puddles around his white-hot feet."I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument," said Dorfl calmly, from somewhere in the clouds of smoke.

Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.

There are all kinds of darkness, and all kinds of things can be found in them, imprisoned, banished, lost or hidden. Sometimes they escape. Sometimes they simply fall out. Sometimes they just can't take it any more.

No more words. We know them all, all the words that should not be said. But you have made my world more perfect.

Fate can be one mean god at times.

It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds.

You never knew about people, like you never knew how deep a pond was because all you saw was the top.

This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.

It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.

They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, "If wet, in the library." Who could say that this is bad?

On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.

Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.

SOONER OR LATER ALL MEN MUST DIE. EVERYTHING DIES IN THE END. I CAN BE ROBBED BUT NEVER DENIED, I TOLD MYSELF. WHY WORRY? “I too cannot be cheated,” snapped Fate.

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors.

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.

The Librarian was not familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bit ethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knew where you were with kindness, especially if you were holding a pie it had just given you.

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals

Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything.

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

But in his experience it was only a matter of time before the normal balance of the universe restored itself and started doing the usual terrible things to him.

Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.

There's a lot of science in it, and as Slartibartfast [in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] said: 'I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.' I've never, ever been able to do one. I remember one occasion at Warwick University, when Jack and Ian were at their wits' end because I couldn't get it. I felt totally ashamed.

Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them-when she thought about them at all-as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.

And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!

Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.