Terry Pratchett Quotes (152 Quotes)

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.