Terry Pratchett Quotes (152 Quotes)

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?

They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

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

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.

It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.

She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Magic never dies. It merely fades away.

I commend my soul to any god that can find it.

You know how to pray, don't you? Just put your hands together and hope.

Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it's so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.

All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.

You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say.

He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.

When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.

On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.

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.