Terry Pratchett Quotes - Page 3

Well, Hell was worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn’t get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.

Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards.

Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.It was its tendency to bend at the knees.

Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight!

They always gives me bath salts," complained Nobby. "And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can't think why, 'cos it's not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You'd think they'd take the hint, wouldn't you?

the whole point of the wish business was to see to it that what the client got was exactly what he asked for and exactly what he didn't really want.

What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.

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.

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

It tells him what to say. I know it sounds ridiculous,” muttered Hugh.“How can a book tell a man what to say?

Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.

There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

You trust him?" he said. "No," said Hastur. "Right," said Ligur. It's be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another.

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.

The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.

Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.

Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?Very nearly everyone, come to think of it...

I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer,” Vetinari went on, looking at a letter covered with grubby fingerprints and what looked like the remains of someone’s breakfast. He added: “In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room.

It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

What is magic?There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.

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

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

When people talk about their great past they're usually trying to excuse the mediocre present.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.

The dwarfs can turn lead into gold...It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.-Can we?-Damned if I know. I can't.-Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could.-Can you?-No!-Ah-ha!

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no cap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. presumably, he said, these must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plan to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

Anger was a weapon to be honed and treasured and used only at the moment yielding most premium.

To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.

The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren’t so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool’s libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.

You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds. And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life.

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.

I recall no arrangement, Mau, no bargain, covenant, agreement or promise. There is what happens, and what does not happen. There is no 'should

But all this business about kings and lords, it's against basic human dignity. We're all born equal. It makes me sick.''Never heard you talk like this before, Frederick,' said Nobby.'It's Sergeant Colon to you, Nobby.

Quick, someone's coming! Look real!

As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo that'd just hopped away.

Miss Tick sniffed. 'You could say this advice is priceless,' she said. 'Are you listening?''Yes,' said Tiffany.'Good. Now ... if you trust in yourself ...''Yes?''... and believe in your dreams ...''Yes?''... and follow your star ...' Miss Tick went on.'Yes?''... you'll still get beaten by people who spent THEIR time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.

I'VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND.

I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?''It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-''Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.''The state of the body is not-''Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.

He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement.

If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

I have to ask, sir...Why does it have to be done like this?"Vetinari smiled. "Can you keep a secret, Mister Lipwig?""Oh, yes, sir. I've kept lots.""Capital. And the point is, so can I. You do not need to know.

I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.

The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.

Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.