Quotes by Terry Pratchett
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Money is all you can think about when all you have is a price, Carrot said.

You want a special truth. *You* want the truth to be a truth that *you* like. You want it to be a pretty little truth that fits what you already believe!

The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.

I get it,' said the prisoner. 'Good Cop, Bad Cop, eh?' If you like.' said Vimes. 'But we're a bit short staffed here, so if I give you a cigarette would you mind kicking yourself in the teeth?

The prayers of most religions generally praise and thank the gods involved, either out of general piety or in the hope that he or she will take the hint and start acting responsibly.

Privilege (to the privileged) means having private laws.

We're really good at it, Teppic thought. Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

The wizards were good at wind, weather being a matter not of force but of lepidoptery. As Archchancellor Ridcully said, you just had to know where the damn butterflies were.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it.

Yes, but nomes aren't hard to make, said Dorcas. You just need other nomes. You're weird.

Everybody needed the witches, but hated the fact that they did, and somehow the hatred of the fact could become the hatred of the person.

You couldn't buy it, you couldn't sell it, but you could give it away and still keep it, and even it'd been made of lead, it would have been worth its weight in gold.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.

No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

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.

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.

Ricewind had always relied on running away. But somerimes, perhaps, you had to stand and fight, if only because there was nowhere left to run.

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

He was, he would be the first to admit, a coward, an incompetent, and not even very good at being a failure.

Probably went swimming and got eaten by a pineapple.

Experience has taught me that you feel better on a flight if you avoid chicken fat in plastic sauce.

Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't.

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

Raise the stakes! Always push your luck because no one else would push it for you.

I have to find the edge of the envelope and put my stamp on it.

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.

On the other hand the Nac Mac Feegle were always looking for a fight, in a cheerful sort of way, and when they had no one to fight they fought one another, and if one was all by himself he'd kick his own nose just to keep in practice.

His sister had been sent down to the village to ask Mistress Garlick the witch how you stopped spelling recommendation.

Interest? What's money interested in?' 'More money.'

The city's full of people who you just see around.

IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.

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

When you have been a possession,
then you really understand what freedom means
in all its magnificent terror.

He's got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures, said Rincewind shortly. Do what the madman says and he will give you gold.

All property is theft, except mine.

Well, the lion is a big ol' coward, mostly. If you want trouble, you want to tangle with the lioness. They're killers, and they hunt together. It's the same everywhere. If you want big grief, look to the ladies.

And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets that you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up.

Tell someone you are going to rob them and all that will happen is that you'll get a reputation as a truthful man.

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.

For several years he hadn't moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There's a certain type of person it's very hard to imprison.

People are bound to get excited when they see a ten-million-ton starship trying to fly down the street.

When in doubt, choose to live.

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn't just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.

Even the blind and meek and voiceless have gods.

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.

I'm a witch. It's what we do. When it's nobody else's business, it's my business.

The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame.

But there's magic too. You'll pick that up. It don't take much intelligence, otherwise wizards wouldn't be able to do it.

Usually they defined listening as a period in which you worked out what you were going to say next.

Wizards! They talked too much and pinned spells down in books like butterflies but, worst of all, they thought theirs was the only magic worth practicing.

Do you think there's anything to eat in this forest? Yes, said the wizard bitterly, us.

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

One day I'll work out what it is you are saying, my lad, and then you'll be in trouble.

So many worlds, so many wonders.

What I've always said was, hang in there, let me write what I want to write, and you'll probably like it.

When your name is really and truly Percy Blakeney, pronounced 'Black-knee', and you still have bad acne in your twenties, you accept Pimple as a nickname and are grateful that it wasn't anything worse.

Bein' human means judgin' all the time, said the voice behind him. This and that, good and bad, making choices every day…that's human.

And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.

Crowley thumped the wheel. Everything had been going so well, he'd had it really under his thumb these few centuries. That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you.

I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month.

If we wanted people to fly, we would have given them wings.
You gave me wings when you showed me birds.

No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a Black Hole that knows how to read.

Don't be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.

He could always materialise and sort things out personally. But he liked people to believe that all the bad things that happened to them were just fate and destiny. It was one of the few things that cheered him up.

In a well-organized world he might have landed on a fire escape, but the fire escapes were unknown in Ankh-Morpork and the flames generally had to leave via the roof.

The Captain of the Watch says if you're still in the City by sunrise he will personally have you buried alive.

Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!

And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.

It took place in the midnight in the University's Great Hall, in a welter of incense, candlesticks, runic inscriptions and magic circles, none of which was strictly necessary but which made the wizards feel better.

He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.

The man gave Dodger a cursory glance that had quite a lot of curse in it.

This was, after all, Ankh-Morpork, where a man walked free even if he was not, strictly speaking, a man.

All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that... Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.

You're allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again.

It's the end game that people dread and that's what I'm scared of.

People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school.

When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry.

That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.

And we don't often get any wading birds in the River Ankh, mainly because the pollution would eat their legs away and anyway, it's easier for them to walk on the surface.

There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien's attic.

And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune? Can't girls seek their fortune? I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune.

The purpose of this lectchoor is to let you know where we are. We are in the deep cack. It couldn't be worse if it was raining arseholes. Any questions?

I can't stand any music that requires its singers to be so dumb they wear their baseball caps backwards.

Just to keep bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death.

Bandits and governments 'ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world.

They can ta'k our lives but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker.

It doesn't matter how you live and die, it's how the bards wrote it down.

Fascism may be good at making the trains run on time, but you wouldn't like some of the destinations.