Terry Pratchett Quotes (152 Quotes)

Moist was sure doctors keep skeletons around to cow patients. Nyer, nyer, we know what you look underneath ...

He was currently wondering vaguely who Moey and Chandon were.

He moved on, in the centre of a widening circle. He wasn't an enemy, he was a nemesis.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.

He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.

Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death.

Soon to come in licorice, orange, cinnamon, and banana, but not strawberry, because I hate strawberries.

Neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success.

In the words of the philosopher Scepturn, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

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.

Fate can be one mean god at times.

That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.

Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.

Occasionally he would very nearly swear.

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

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.

He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.

The complete reverse was so often the case that he had come to think of it as a kind of natural law.

Steal five dollars and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero.

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.

I've seen excitement, and I've seen boredom. And boredom was best.

The demon coughed nervously. Demons do not breathe; however, every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life. And this was one of them as far as the demon was concerned.

The figure stopped to cough long and hard, making a noise like a wall being hit repeatedly with a bag of rocks. Moist saw that it had a beard of the short bristled type that suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.

One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.

Their families cordially detested one another.

The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.

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

The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.

There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitely wicked.

We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.

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.

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.

Usually he didn't bother the gods, and he hoped the gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.

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.

Theres no stink more sorrorful than the stink of wet, burnt paper. It means: the end.

Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.

When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend.

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

It is embarrassing to know that one is a god of a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end; especially when one can peer into other dimensions at worlds whose Creators had more mechanical aptitude than imagination. No wonder, then, that the Disc gods spend more time in bickering than in omnicognizance.

You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

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