Terry Pratchett Quotes

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“Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.”

“And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.”

“Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face.”

“Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.”

“It's always surprising to be reminded that while you're watching and thinking about people, all knowing and superior, they're watching and thinking about you, right back at you.”

“Because no man wants to be a coward in front of a cheese.”

“Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive.”

“We're on a mission from Glod.”

“When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.”

“Inside every lump of coal there's a diamond waiting to get out.”

“… All the shops have been smashed open. There was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?"

"Yeah," said Rincewind. "… Luters, I expect.”

“I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man canna feel the chilly winds o' fate lashing aroound his netheres wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?”

“Thunder rolled.. It rolled a six.”

“It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.”

“They can tak' oour lives but they canna tak' oour troousers!”

“Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy
that eluded him at the moment.”

“Raising the flag and singing the anthem are, while somewhat suspicious, not in themselves acts of treason.”

“Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.”

“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.”

“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.”

“Personal isn't the same as important.”

“The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.”

“There’s lots of people will help you with alcohol business, but there’s no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, ‘My name is Sam Vimes and I’m a really suspicious bastard.”

“I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.”

“Money doesn't buy happiness, Gytha."
"I only wanted to rent it for a few weeks!”

“YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.”

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

“Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.”

“People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.”

“It wasn't that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.”

“Witches aren’t like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

“Questions don't have to make sense, Vincent," said Miss Susan. "But answers do.”

“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.”

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

“Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.”

“This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier.

(Except that of course you can't have afrontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate…)”

“Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.”

“This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.”

“Some people believe that when you die, you cross the River of Death and have to pay the ferryman. People don’t seem to worry about that these days. Perhaps there’s a bridge now.”

“People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.”

“Granny Weatherwax was not a good loser. From her point of view, losing was something that happened to other people.”

“Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.”

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

“… the little man's total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.”

“YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE"
"And what's that?"
"A SHARP EDGE.”

“If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.”

“He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people.”

“But this didn'tlike magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music.”