Terry Pratchett Quotes

Rincewind tried not to think of World Turtles mating. It wasn't completely easy.

No one's going to be interested in a war fought over a, a quite pleasant lady, moderately attractive in a good light. Are they?" Eric was nearly in tears. "But it said her face launched a thousand ships - " "That's what you call metaphor," said Rincewind. "Lying," the sergeant explained, kindly.

We all have our funny little ways. Except me, obviously.

Oh, good grief," said Vimes. "Look, it's quite simple, man. I was expected to go "At last, alcohol!", and chugalug the lot without thinking. Then some respectable pillars of the community" - he removed the cigar from his mouth and spat - "were going to find me, in your presence, too - which was a nice touch - with the evidence of my crime neatly hidden but not so well hidden that they couldn't find it." He shook his head sadly. "The trouble is, you know, that once the taste's got you it never lets go."
"But you've been very good, sir," said Carrot. "I've not seen you touch a drop for -"
"Oh, that," said Vimes. "I was talking about policing, not alcohol. There's lots of people will help you with the alcohol business, but there's no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, "My name is Sam and I'm a really suspicious bastard.

Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.

He removed his hat, something a wizard doesn't ordinarily do unless he's about to pull something out of it, and handed it to the Bursar. Then he tore a thin strip off the bottom of his robe, held it dramatically in both hands, and tied it around his forehead.
"It's part of the ethos," he said, in answer to their penetratingly unspoken question. "That's what the warriors on the Counterweight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout --" He tried to remember some far-off reading. "-er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!"
"I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small," said the Senior Wrangler.
The Dean hesitated. He wasn't too sure himself, if it came to it.
But a good wizard never let uncertainty stand in his way.
"No, it's definitely got to be bonsai," he said. He considered it some more then brightened up. "On account of it all being part of bushido. Like...small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it."
"But you can't shout 'bonsai' here." said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "We've got a totally different cultural background. It'd be useless. No one will know what you mean.
"I'll work on it, " said the Dean.*

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.

If there's one thing that really annoys a god, it's not knowing something.

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvellous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself towards the city and sped away.

It liked action, too . . .

Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

It's . . . it's like a legend! It has to happen!

This one [girl] had a slight suggestion of too many chocolates.

I've brought you some camomile tea, sir," said Albert. HMM? "Sir?" SORRY. I WAS THINKING. WHAT WAS IT YOU SAID? "Camomile tea?" I THOUGHT THAT WAS A KIND OF SOAP? "You can put it in soap or tea, sir," said Albert. He was worried. He was always worried when Death started to think about things. It was the wrong job for thinking about things. And he thought about them in the wrong way.

Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

If he could get the idea of paper money past them then he was home and, if not dry, then at least merely Moist.

Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.

There were no judges and no prizes. The Trials weren't like that, as Petulia had said. The point was to show what you could do, to show what you'd become, so that people would go away thinking things like 'That Caramella Bottlethwaite, she's coming along nicely.' It wasn't a competition, honestly. No one won.

And if you believed that, you'd believe that the moon is pushed around the sky by a goblin called Wilberforce.

The river, it's banks as yet untamed wandered languidly through thickets of rush and papyrus. Ibises waded in the shallows; in the deeps hippos rose and sank slowly like pickled eggs.

The future is always a bit wobbly. Any little thing, like the fall of a snowflake or the dropping of the wrong kind of spoon, can send it spinning off along a new path. Or perhaps not.

Silk stockings. With garters. Well, they were out. There were a lot of things he'd do for Sybil, but if garters figured anywhere in the relationship they weren't going to be on him.

I thought unicorns were more . . . Fluffy.

You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.

You could choose immortality, or you chould choose humanity.

You had to do it for yourself.

All canines could interbreed, even back to the original wolves, so that must mean that, deep down inside, every dog was a wolf. You could make a dog out of a wolf, but you couldn't take the wolf out of a dog.

He wished he'd had time to drink dinner.

Of course, like all the informal inhabitants of the University the roaches were a little unusual, but there was something particularly unpleasant about the sound of billions of very small feet hitting the stones in perfect time.
Rincewind stepped gingerly over the marching column. The Librarian jumped it.
The Luggage, of course, followed them with a noise like someone tapdancing over a bag of crisps.

What we are, in fact, are electronic ape-men. We woke up just now in the electronic dawn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. And we're reaching out and touching it and saying, "Is it WAP enabled? Can we have sex with it? Can you get it in a different colour? Is it being sold cheap because the Monolith2 is being released next month and has a built-in PDA for the same price?

You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you.

Barbarism? Hah! When we kills people we do it there and then, lookin' 'em in the eye, and we'd be happy to buy 'em a drink in the next world, no harm done. I never knew a barbarian who cut up people slowly in little rooms, or tortured women to make 'em look pretty, or put poison in people's grub. Civilization? If that's civilization, you can shove it where the sun don't shine!

Everything around Rincewind was black. It wasn't simply an absence of colour. It was darkness that flatly denied any possibility that colour might ever have existed.

The babies looked similar, both being small, blotchy, and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.

Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.

How can you be the good guys if you're dropping clever bombs right down people's chimneys? And blowing people up just because they're being bossed around by a loony?

Men cannot progress if they are carried like
leaves on a stream. People need to be able to waste time, make time, lose time, and buy
time.

The face you wear in a battlefield should be a solemn one until the time when things are cleaned up and the real world drips its way in.

As for Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, all that need be known about them at this point is that they are the kind of people who call you "friend." People like that aren't friendly.

Fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.

Vimes looked a little deflated.
"You can't tell me as commander of police I can't stop some little ti-- some idiot from writing down anything he likes?"
"Oh, no, sir. Of course you can. But I'm not sure you can stop him from writing down that you stopped him writing things down," said Carrot.

Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.

Do you think that's a good idea, sir?'
'Yes, sergeant, I do. It was one of mine.

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.

The Octavo filled the room with a dull, sullen light, which wasn't strictly light at all but the opposite of light; darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he'd wanted things to stay the same, as well.

I THINK NOT. I WASN'T CUT OUT TO BE A FATHER, AND CERTAINLY NOT A GRANDAD. I HAVEN'T GOT THE RIGHT KIND OF KNEES.

Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters.

People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?
And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.
So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.

Here you are. Would you like some pickles?"
"Pickles gives me the wind something awful."
"In that case - "
"Oh, I wasn't saying no," Mistress Weatherwax said, taking two large pickled cucumbers.

I THINK ... I THINK I COULD BE FRIENDS WITH THE GREEN BOTTLE.

That was the trouble with wizards, they had to make everything look difficult. All you really needed was willpower. And the Brethren had a lot of that. Small-minded and vitriolic willpower, yes, lousy with malignity maybe, but still powerful enough in its way ...

I imagine that fish have no word for water.

We are in the damnation business!!!
And this, too, was a happiness. Of a sort.

Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested.

Well,
me," he said. "A
ing wizard. I hate
ing wizards!" "You shouldn't
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He'sh mad?"
"Sort of mad. But mad with lots of money."
"Ah, then he can't be mad. I've been around; if a man hash lotsh of money he'sh just ecshentric.

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Mr. False! No, don't start grabbing the chickens! Better off farmer with no chickens than a load of chickens with no farmer! Anyway, they'll probably float, or fly, or something!

Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding to door when it is really coming up through the floorboards. Real dark forces ... aren't dark. They're sort of gray, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the color out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no one wants to live and no one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes gray and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic ...

That's the trouble about the good guys and the bad guys! They're all guys!

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

In order to have a change of fortune at the last minute, you have to take your fortune to the last minute.

Allegedly, 50 per cent of Americans believe that the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, which if true says something rather sad about the most expensive education system in the world.

Death, although exceptionally busy at all times, decided that He now had a hobby.

The public is not interested in news in the public interest.

Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.

They want dancing girls! They want thrills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!

Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those curs who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razor blades from the candyfloss of life

It had to be Death. No-one else went around with empty eye sockets and, of course, the scythe over one shoulder was another clue.

The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn't enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness.

I believe you vere an alcoholic, Sir Samuel."
"No," said Vimes, completely taken aback, "I was a drunk. You have to be richer than I was to
be an alcoholic.

These days everybody used the clacks, even little old ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about all these newfangled ideas, totally missing the irony.

Nanny Ogg had a pragmatic attitude to the truth; she told it if it was convenient and she couldn't be bothered to make up something more interesting.

Then Tak looked upon the stone and it was trying to come alive, and Tak smiled, and wrote All things strive.

And for the service the stone had given, he fashioned it into the first Troll, and delighted in the life that came unbidden.

She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she'd smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.

The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.
There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.
'And there's the sign, Ridcully,' said the Dean. 'You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door"?'
'Of course I've read it,' said Ridcully. 'Why d'yer think I want it opened?'
'Er ... why?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'To see why they wanted it shut, of course.'
This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.

Odd thing, ain't it ... you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls." "That's mob rule!

They are brought up to give orders, they know that they're on the right side because if they are on it then it must be the right side, by definition, and when they feel threatened they are bare-knuckle fighters, except that they never take their gloves off. They are thugs. Thugs and bullies, bullies, and the worst kind of bully, because they aren't cowards and if you stand up to them they only hit you harder. They grew up in a world where, if you were enough trouble, they could have you ... disappeared. You think places like the Shades are bad? Then you don't know what goes on in Park Lane! And my father is one of the worst. But I'm family. We ... care about family. So I'll be all right. You stay here and help them get the paper out, will you? Half a truth is better than nothing, he added bitterly.

Willow bark," said the Bursar. "That's a good idea," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "It's an analgesic." "Really? Well, possibly, though it's probably better to give it to him by mouth,

It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego.

Oh, we're always all right. You remember that. We happen to other people.
-Nanny Ogg

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

I heard it was made of the same stuff they make them fortune-telling crystals out of. You can't tell me that's right. And he looks at you with it," said the first speaker. He was known as Peachy, although no one had ever found out why.*

Thick coils of smoke hung in the air, perhaps to avoid touching the walls.

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.

I hate ****ing wizards!
You shouldn't **** them, then

Death, although of course completely eyeless, watched Rincewind disappearing with what would, had His face possessed any mobility at all, have been a frown. Death, although exceptionally busy at all times, decided that He now had a hobby. There was something about the wizard that irked Him beyond measure. He didn't keep appointments, for one thing.

Daphne's thought in Nation:
This was no time to go totally mad. You had to maintain standards.

SEE! I HAVE TIME. AT LAST, I HAVE TIME
Albert backed away nervously.
'And now that you have it, what are you going to do with it?' he said.
Death mounted his horse.
I AM GOING TO SPEND IT.

Its the same everywhere. If you want big grief, look to the ladies.

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.

I don't reckon it's allowed, going round setting fire to people," said Adam. "Otherwise people'd be doin' it all the time."
"It's all right if you're religious," said Brian reassuringly. "And it stops the witches from goin' to Hell, so I expect they'd be quite grateful if they understood it properly.

When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom, he means his, not anyone else's.

And if they come in force, show them what the Feegles can dae!" Daft Wullie said, "I can play the harmonica." Rob Anybody sighed. "Aye, weel, I suppose that puts the willies up me, so wud likely keep them awa'.

Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.

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.

What I say is, if a witch can't look after herself, she's got no business calling herself a witch.

It was the same book, every day. The pages of said book were rounded and soft where Young Sam had chewed them, but to one person in this nursery this was the book of books, the greatest story ever told. Vimes didn't need to read it any more. He knew it by heart.

It was called Where's My Cow?

The unidentified complainant had lost their cow. That was the story, really.

Page one started promisingly:

Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, "Baa!"

It is a sheep! That's not my cow!

Then the author began to get to grips with their material:

Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, "Neigh!"

It is a horse! That's not my cow!

At this point the author had reached an agony of creation and was writing from the racked depths of their soul.

Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, "Hruuugh!"

It is a hippopotamus! That's not my cow!

This was a good evening. Young Sam was already grinning widely and crowing along with the plot.

Eventually, the cow would be found. It was that much of a pageturner. Of course, some suspense was lent by the fact that all other animals were presented in some way that could have confused a kitten, who perhaps had been raised in a darkened room. The horse was standing in front of a hatstand, as they so often did, and the hippo was eating at a trough against wh

Good people have no business being so bad. Goodness is about what you do. Not what you pray to.

The room was full of the kind of light you got when you woke up on a winter's morning and knew, by the light, that it had snowed. It was a light without shadows. He

Things are different here, sir," said Carrot. "It wasn't until ten years ago they replaced trial by ordeal here with trial by lawyer, and that was only because they found that lawyers were nastier.