Quotes by Terry Pratchett
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You were safe on a troll. Anyone wanting to mug a troll would have to use a building on a stick.

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.

You can't trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.

Never trust a species that grins all the time. It's up to something.

It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man *would* have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead. It would be hard to be deader without special training.

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

In fact, if there were such a thing as an international thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone's wallets.

The beef stew tasted, indeed, just like beef stew and not, just to take an example completely and totally at random, stew made out of the last poor girl who'd worked here.

I would rather stare at the wall for half an hour than watch an episode of any of the 53,801 Australian soap operas now cluttering up UK TV.

Once people get the idea that they can listen to music for nothing, where will it end?

Oh, where are my manners? Do sit down. Pull up a small child.

The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

I know it's not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig! My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow… Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!

Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.

Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate.

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

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.

Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem.

Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted advisor.

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor, I don't know who is.

Next comes the realist phase (After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.)

What's the orbital velocity of the moon?

I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.

Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village -- the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.

A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.

The thing about witchcraft, said Mistress Weatherwax, is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect.

Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal.... The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench.

No one thinks that young adults read books for young adults; books for young adults are read by kids.

Young adults that actually read are reading bodice rippers and best-sellers and me. And Horror.

His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.

Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.

If anyone locked me in a dungeon, there'd be screams.

Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!

The year was past the edge, heading away from the dark... Of course, dark would come again, but that was in the nature of the world. Many things were beginning.

You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although synergistically had probably been a whore from the start.

Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier.
(Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate ...)

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

He glanced at the sun which, old professional that it was, chose that moment to drop below the horizon.

Given enough coffee I could rule the world.

Who shall I shoot? You choose. Now, listen very carefully: where's your coffee? You've got coffee, haven't you? C'mon, everyone's got coffee! Spill the beans!

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea.

Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad.

Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.

He hated weapons, and not just because they'd so often been aimed at him. You got into more trouble if you had a weapon. People shot you instantly if they thought you were going to shoot them.

What your soldier wants -- really, really wants -- is no-one shooting back at him.

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

Human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium.

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.

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.

I've never really liked the Yanks. ... You can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football.

And the new day was a great big fish.

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

No, I happen to be one of those people whose memory shuts down under pressure. The answers would come to me in the middle of the night in my sleep! Besides, I am a millionaire.

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.

Sometimes, the best answer is a more interesting question.

Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?

We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index,' he said. 'Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects.'
Precisely,' said a passing bush.

You don't want people to be kind to animals because they're animals, you just want people to be kind to animals because one of them might be you.

Sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

The enemy isn't men, or women, it's bloody stupid people and no-one has the right to be stupid.

Steal five dollars and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero.

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.

Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!

The second mouse gets the cheese!

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?

The universe, they say, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness.

Now look, snapped the Dean, we've searched everywhere for a decent library on this island. There simply isn't one! It's ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to get anything done?

If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone's wallets.

Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.

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.

You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.

Sergeant Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Guard was on duty. He was guarding the Brass Bridge, the main link between Ankh and Morpork. From theft.
When it came to crime prevention, Sergeant Colon found it safest to think big.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Some shadows are so long, they arrive before the light.

No more words. We know them all, all the words that should not be said. But you have made my world more perfect.

People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but expect dinner to turn up within the hour.

Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple.

Granny looked up at the zombie. He was -- or, technically, had been -- a tall, handsome man. He still was, only now he looked like someone who had walked through a room full of cobwebs.
'What's your name, dead man?' she said.