Terry Pratchett Quotes (152 Quotes)

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.

An Assassin, a real Assassin had to look like one-black clothes, hood, boots, and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?

Humans! They lived in the world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and anzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...

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

On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed.

In defiance of Miss Maccalariat I'd like to commit hanky-panky with you, Miss Adora Belle Dearheart... well, certainly hanky, and possibly panky when we get to know one another better.

But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.

But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.

It's no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way

Words are the litmus paper of the mind.

Possession of the box conferred a kind of power on the wielder--which was that anyone, confronted with the hypnotic glass eye, would submissively obey the most peremptory orders about stance and expression.

It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.

DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.

But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.

Being Ymor's right-hand man was like being gently flogged to death with scented bootlaces.

Powiedzmy, z.e gdyby nadcia;ga? ca?kowity i absolutny chaos, on, w mokrym miedzianym pancerzu, stana;?by na szczycie wzgórza w czasie burzy z piorunami i wrzeszcza?: „Wszyscy bogowie to be;karty!

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

He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba.

Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery.

Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.

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.

Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.

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.