Terry Pratchett Quotes!

Pratchettisms

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

  • "You pretend that rats can think, and I'll promise to pretend that humans can think, too." ~Darktan
  • YOU CAN'T LOSE MORE THAN ONE LIFE AT A TIME, EVEN IF YOU'RE A CAT. ~Death
  • "I may be stupid-looking, but I'm not stupid. I have time to think about things because I don't keep on talking all the time. I look at things. I listen. I try to learn." ~Keith, aka The Stupid-Looking Kid
  • "If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story....You're just a face in someone else's background." ~Malicia
  • "Actually, I was just being flippant. But I can do sarcastic if you like." ~Maurice
  • "Surely even humans wouldn't make a book about Ratty Rupert the Rat, who wore a hat, and poison rats under the floorboards at the same time. Would they? How mad would anything have to be to think like that?" ~Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
  • "What good was a cat with a conscience? A cat with a conscience was a…a hamster, or something." ~Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
  • "The crowd looked doubtful. They hadn't read as many stories as Malicia, and they were rather more attached to the experience of real life, which is that when someone small and righteous takes on someone big and nasty, he is grilled bread product, every time." ~Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Bromeliad

  • "The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." ~Terry Pratchett, The Bromeliad

Carpe Jugulum

  • “Things were simpler then. And also very, very stupid.” ~The Count de Magpyr
  • “And that which does kill us leaves us dead!” ~Lacrimosa de Magpyr
  • “Most people put up with most things, Agnes.” ~Vlad de Magpyr
  • “As she tucked in her hair and observed herself critically in the mirror she sang a song. She sang in harmony. Not, of course, with her reflection in the glass, because that kind of heroine will sooner or later end up singing a duet with Mr. Bluebird and other forest creatures and then there’s nothing for it but a flamethrower.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “Agnes thought…that ‘cool’ was a dumb word only used by people whose brains wouldn’t fill a spoon.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “On the rare maps of the Ramtops that existed, it was spelled Überwald. But Lancre people had never got the hang of accents and certainly didn’t agree with trying to balance two dots on another letter, where they’d only roll off and cause unnecessary punctuation.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “In fact there are many things everyone knows about vampires, without really taking into account that perhaps the vampires know them by now, too.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “King Verence was very keen that someone should compose a national anthem for Lancre, possibly referring to its very nice trees, and had offered a small reward. Nanny Ogg reasoned that it would be easy money because national anthems only ever have one verse or, rather, all have the same second verse, which goes “nur…hnur…mur…nur nur, hnur…nur…nur, hnur” at some length until everyone remembers the last line of the first verse and sings it as loudly as they can.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “’Shall I see you again tomorrow?’ said Vlad, proving to Agnes that males of every species could posses a stupidity gene.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “There’s no point in having underlings if you don’t let them be the first to go through suspicious doors.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • “A push-and-go wooden duck on wheels can cause quite a lot of damage if wielded with enough force.” ~Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
  • "The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches, they gave you a bigger shovel." ~Terry Pratchett about Granny Weatherwax

The Colour of Magic

  • "It had been remarked before that those who are sensitive to radiations in the far octarine - the eighth color, the pigment of the Imagination - can see things that others cannot." ~Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
  • "It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing in space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going around to atheists' houses and smashing their windows." ~Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
  • "The Disc gods themselves, despite the splendor of the world below them, are seldom satisfied. 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." ~Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
  • "'It is forbidden to fight on the Killing Ground,' he said, and paused while he considered the sense of this." ~Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
  • "Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture." ~Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
  • "Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying." ~Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
  • "The Luggage had an elemental nature, absolutely no brain, a homicidal attitude toward anything that threatened its master, and [Rincewind] wasn't quite sure that its insides occupied the same space-time framework as its outside." ~Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
  • "You don't understand at all. I'm so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it's just that I'm suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I've got over that then I'll have time to be decently frightened of you." ~Rincewind
  • "Yes, I thought it would be something like seaweed. They certainly taste like seaweed would taste if anyone was masochistic enough to eat seaweed." ~Rincewind
  • "I've seen excitement, and I've seen boredom. And boredom was best." ~Rincewind
  • "Sometimes I think a man could wander across the Disc all his life and not see everything there is to see. And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel, well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course." ~Twoflower

Equal Rites

  • LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING. ~Death
  • “’If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “The smith nodded. He didn’t really understand, but he correctly surmised that if he revealed this fact Granny would start going into horrible details.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn’t hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about life and had seen the joke.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “…enough blips of sense reached her through the heterodyne wails of a thousand minds all thinking at once to convince her that the world was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel like the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer.’ They feel they are poking fun of the whole thing.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “…a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “…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 halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as self-centered as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional décor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow, or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage-even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “…p’ch’zarni’chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K’turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word ‘squernt’ (‘the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper’) begins to approach it in general depth of feeling.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “There should be a word for words that sound like things would sound like if they made a noise, [Cutangle] thought. The word ‘glisten’ does indeed gleam oily, and if there was ever a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way lights of cities would creep across the world if the whole human civilization was crammed into one night, then you couldn’t do better than ‘coruscate’.” ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • "Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel, merely terribly, terribly good at his job" ~Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
  • “I don’t want to hit the ground. It’s never done anything to me.” ~Eskarina Smith
  • “You’re a bit young for this, but as you grow older you’ll find most people don’t set foot outside their own heads much.” ~Granny Weatherwax to Esk

Eric

  • "...so many things had happened to him recently he was prepared to concede that he might have died and not noticed it in the confusion..." ~Terry Pratchett about Rincewind, Eric
  • “Rincewind wasn’t used to people being pleased to see him. It was unnatural, and boded no good.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “That was the thing about time travel. You were never ready for it. About the only thing he could hope for, Rincewind decided, was finding da Quirm’s Fountain of Youth and managing to stay alive for a few thousand years so he’d be ready to kill his own grandfather, which was the only aspect of time travel that had ever remotely appealed to him.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “Nightmares are usually rather daft things and it’s very hard to explain to a listener what was so dreadful about your socks coming alive or giant carrots jumping out of the hedgerows.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “Now he realized what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “He didn’t like the sound of Him being back and Him being angry. Whenever something important enough to deserve capital letters was angry in the vicinity of Rincewind, it was usually angry with him.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “The problem with being evil, [the King of Demons]’d been forced to admit, was that demons were not great inventory thinkers and really needed the spice of human ingenuity.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “Rincewind gave his fingers a long shocked stare, as one might regard a gun that has been hanging on the wall for decades and has suddenly gone off and perforated the cat.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • “Preeminent among Rincewind’s talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn’t matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I’ll still be.” ~Terry Pratchett, Eric
  • "You'd be astonished how many kingdoms aren't ruled by Amazonian princesses, Eric." ~Rincewind
  • “The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.” ~Rincewind
  • “Aargh.” ~Rincewind
  • “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” ~Rincewind

Feet of Clay

  • "No one can be as sane as he is without being mad." ~Mr. Boggis (?) about Vetinari
  • "Amazing t'ing, trouble. Always I go lookin' for trouble, an' when I find it people say it ain't dere." ~Constable Detritus
  • "Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms Of Denial. Therefore, Atheism Is A Form Of Belief. If The Atheist Truly Did Not Believe, He Or She Would Not Bother To Deny." ~Lance Constable Dorfl
  • "What Better Work For One Who Loves Freedom Than The Job Of Watchman? Law Is The Servant Of Freedom. Freedom Without Limits Is Just A Word." ~Lance Constable Dorfl
  • "I think [Vimes]'s got a sort of soft spot for the Patrician, in his way. He once said that if anyone was going to kill Vetinari, he'd like it to be him." ~Captain Carrot Ironfounderson
  • “It was easy to be a vegetarian by day. It was preventing yourself becoming a humanitarian at night that took the real effort.” ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • “But Vimes was a policeman. No one lived a completely blameless life. It might be just possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you were probably guilty of loitering.” ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "'D*mn!' said Carrot, a difficult linguistic feat." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "Fred Colon hadn't reached Vimes's level of sophisticated despair. Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "It is not a good idea to spray finest brandy across the room, especially when your lighted cigar is in the way." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls' view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping hemispherical view of the world. Since there were two separate visions, Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls having not been bred for much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe this, which is why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at you. They do this because both of them want to see." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "…ahead of Vimes was a ding-a-ling so big he'd been upgraded to a clang-a-lang." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "Thousands of years ago the old empire had enforced the Pax Morporkia, which had said to the world: 'Do not fight or we will kill you.' The Pax had arisen again, but this time it said: 'If you fight, we'll call in your mortgages. And incidentally, that's my pike you're pointing at me. I paid for that shield you're holding. And take my helmet off when you speak to me, you horrible little debtor.'" ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "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." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "The Watch was back and out there on the streets, and it they weren't actually as good as Detritus at kicking [tail feather] they were definitely prodding buttock." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "[Vimes]'d always imagined that manky was how your mouth felt after three days on a regurgitated diet. It was horrible to think you could look like that." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in [Tartarus]." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • "Vimes yawned. Sleep. He'd be better for some sleep. Or something." ~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
  • “There’s some magical creature called, ‘overtime,’ only no one’s even seen its footprints.” ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • “We work as a team and we’re pretty much making it up as we go along, and half the time we’re not even certain what the law is, so it can get interesting.” ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "I was talking about policing, not alcohol. There's lots of people willing to help you with the alcohol business, but there's no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, 'My name is Sam and I'm a really suspicious [jerk].'" ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "The Watchman's helmet isn't like a crown. Even when you take it off, you're still wearing it." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "That's rumor for you. If we could modulate it with the truth, how useful it could be…" ~Commander Sir Samuel Vimes
  • "I'm worried and confused. So the first rule in the book is to spread it around." ~Commander Sir Samuel Vimes
  • "Of course you can't. Because there's nothing to see. You can't see it. That's how you can tell it's there. If it wasn't there, you'd soon see it! [huge, manic grin] Only you wouldn't! See?" ~Commander Sir Samuel Vimes on light
  • "It's never too soon to contemplate eternal damnation, sir." ~Constable Visit-the-Infidels-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets
  • "Someone has to be very complex indeed to be as simple as Carrot." ~Constable Angua von Überwald
  • "You're being reasonable again! You're deliberately seeing everyone's point of view! Can't you try to be unfair even once?" ~Constable Angua von Überwald to Captain Carrot Ironfounderson

The Fifth Elephant

  • "Nasty place, Uberwald. I heard where it's a mystery wrapped in an enema." ~Sergeant Fred Colon
  • "It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren't the people the people who made up the phrase 'people are people everywhere' had traditionally thought of as people." ~Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
  • "There is a saying: It won't get better if you picket." ~Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
  • "Sometimes it would be nice to be wrong about people." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "You're humming, Sam. That means that something awful is going to happen to somebody." ~Duchess Sybil Vimes

Going Postal

  • “[Veterinary work] was a good, traditional area, certainly. Pity about all that publicity when the hamster smashed its way out of its treadmill and ate that man’s leg before flying away, but that was Progreth for you.” ~Igor
  • “Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “So this was it. It was, in some strange way, rather liberating. You didn’t have to fear the worst that could happen anymore, because this was it, and it was nearly over.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “Gilt and Vetinari shared a look. It said: While I loathe you and every aspect of your personal philosophy to a depth unplumbable by any line, I’ll credit you at least with not being Crispin Horsefry.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “Just below the dome, staring down from their niches, were statues of the Virtues: Patience, Chastity, Silence, Charity, Hope, Tubso, Bissonomy*, and Fortitude. (*Many cultures practice neither of these in the hustle and bustle of the modern world, because no one can remember what they are.)” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “Often, but not uniquely, a ladle, but sometimes a metal spatula or, rarely, a mechanical egg-whisk that nobody in the house admits to ever buying. The desperate, mad rattling and cries of ‘How can it close on the damn thing but not open with it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?’ is as praise unto Anoia [a minor goddess of Things that Stick in Drawers]. She also eats corkscrews.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “It is not often that a wailing woman rushes into a room and throws herself at a man. It had never happened to Moist before. Now it happened, and it seemed such a waste that the woman was Miss Macclariat....Moist reeled under her weight. She was dragging at his collar so hard that he was likely to end up on the floor, and the thought of being found on the floor with Miss Macclariat was-well, a thought that just couldn’t be thoughted. The head would explode before thoughting it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “There was a pregnant pause. It gave birth to a lot of little pauses, each one more deeply embarrassing than its parent.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “Moist missed the rest of the sentence. Innocent words swirled in it like debris caught in a flood, occasionally bobbing to the surface and waving desperately before being pulled under again. He caught ‘the’ several times before it drowned, and even ‘disconnect’ and ‘gear chain,’ but the roaring, technical polysyllables rose and engulfed them all.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “[Moist] wasn’t interested in machinery; he thought of a spanner as something that had another person holding it. It was best to just smile and wait. That was the thing about artificers, they loved explaining. You just had to wait until they reached your level of understanding, even if it meant that they had to lie down.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “Peel away the lies , and the truth would emerge, naked and ashamed and with nowhere else to hide.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “The people who guard the rainbow don’t like those who get in the way of the sun.” ~Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
  • “I reasoned that if I destroyed the world all in one go, no one would know.” ~Mr. Rumbelow
  • “[The big horned helmet] makes me so noticeable that no one will suspect I’m trying not to be noticed, so they won’t bother to notice me.” ~Sane Alex
  • “In my experience, the best way to get something done is to give it to someone who is done.” ~Havelock Vetinari
  • “What you had to do in this life was get past the pineapple. It was big and sharp and knobbly, but there might be peaches underneath.” ~Moist von Lipwig
  • “[I invited you to dinner] Because you called me a phony. You saw through me straight away. Because you didn’t nail my head to the door with your crossbow. Because you have no small talk. Because I’d like to get to know you better, even though it would be like smooching an ashtray. Because I wonder if you could put into the rest of your life the passion you put into smoking a cigarette. 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 each other better.” ~Moist von Lipwig
  • “And so we progress. Always keep moving. There may be something behind you.” ~Moist von Lipwig

Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)

  • "We seem to have survived. Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we'd been at all competent." ~Aziraphale
  • "Just remember I'll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a [jerk] to be worth liking." ~Crowley
  • "You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire. And don't bother to answer. If we could understand, we wouldn't be us." ~Crowley
  • "But my people are only in favour of disobedience in general terms. It's specific disobedience they come down on heavily." ~Crowley, a demon
  • "Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren't deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors - doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren't paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do and just did it." ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • "The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it." ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Humans suffering from a conflict of signals aren’t the best people to be holding guns, especially when they’ve just witnessed a natural childbirth, which definitely looked an un-American way of bringing new citizens into the world.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Anathema owned very little in the way of furniture. The only thing she’d bothered to bring with her had been her clock, one of the family heirlooms. It wasn’t a full-cased grandfather clock, but a wall clock with a free-swinging pendulum that E.A. Poe would cheerfully have strapped someone under.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “When most people said ‘I’m psychic, you see,’ they meant ‘I have an over-active but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie’; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she’d much prefer not to have.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by a Geneva Convention. It’s much worse when the relative has been dead for three hundred years.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Newt had indeed been harboring certain thoughts about Anathema; not just harboring them, in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint, and scraping the barnacles off their bottom.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “The manuals were still in their transparent wrapping.* (*Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electro the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly, and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself to be lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufaturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extrememly impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: ‘Learn, guys.’” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Hastur was paranoid, which was simply a sensible and well-adjusted reaction to living in Tartarus, where they really were all out to get you.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “It was nice to think that mankind made a distinction between blowing their planet to bits by accident and doing it by design.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • “Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to chose between their leader and a circus with elephants.” ~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  • "That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl." ~Pippin Galadriel "Pepper" Moonchild
  • "I've never really liked the Yanks…you can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football." ~Madame Tracy
  • "It's hard enough bein' people as it is, without other people coming and messin' you around." ~Adam Young
  • "I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then getting' upset 'cos they act like people." ~Adam Young
  • "Anyway, if you'd stop tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. If I was in charge, I'd try makin' people live a lot longer, like ole Methuselah. It'd be a lot more interestin' and they might start thinkin' about the sort of things they're doin' to the environment and ecology, because they'd still be around in a hundred year's time." ~Adam Young
  • "I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out." ~Adam Young
  • "Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale." ~Adam Young

Guards! Guards!

  • "You mean set a deep hole with spring-loaded sides, trip-wires, whirling knife blades driven by water power, broken glass, and scorpions to catch a thief, Captain?" ~Sergeant Fred Colon
  • "…you know we've all got alcohol in our bodies…sort of natural alcohol? Even if you never touch a drop in your life, your body sort of makes it anyway…but Captain Vimes, see, he's one of those people whose body doesn't do it naturally. Like, he was born two drinks below normal….so when he's sober, he's really sober. Knurd, they call it. You know how you feel when you wake up if you've been [drunk] all night, Nobby? Well, he feels like that all the time." ~Sergeant Fred Colon
  • "The people united can never be ignited." ~Sergeant Fred Colon
  • "I wish Captain Vimes were here. He wouldn't have known what to do either, but he's got a much better vocabulary to be baffled in." ~Sergeant Fred Colon
  • You have the effrontery to be squeamish. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless, and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape - we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality. ~The Dragon
  • "In the hours until dawn, he'd had all sorts of opinions, starting with a conviction that it had been a big mistake to be born." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "It was clearly the room of a woman, but one who had cheerfully and without any silly moping been getting on with her life while all that soppy romance stuff had been happening to other people somewhere else, and been jolly grateful that she had her health." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "He couldn't help remembering how much he'd wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they'd been starving - anything with meat on it would have done." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Finding that you are dead is mitigated by also finding that there really is a you who can find you dead." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "[Vimes] wondered whether there was, somewhere in that vast pantheon, a god who would look kindly on hard-pressed and fairly innocent law-enforcers who were quite definitely about to die." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "[Errol] was also turning on Captain Vimes the most silently intelligent look he'd ever had from any animal, including Corporal Nobbs." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Total whittle, Vimes thought. He wasn't sure of the precise meaning of the word, but he could hazard a shrewd guess. It sounded like whatever it was you had left when you had extracted everything of any value whatsoever. Like the Watch, he thought. Total whittles, every one of them." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "If you let your mind dwell on rooms like [Lady Sybil Ramkin's], you could end up being oddly sad and full of strange, diffuse compassion which would lead you to believe that it might be a good idea to wipe out the whole human race and start again with amoebas." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "No swamp dragon could ever terrorize a kingdom, except by accident. Vimes wondered how many had been killed by enterprising heroes. It was terribly cruel to do something like that to creatures whose only crime was to blow themselves absent-mindedly to pieces in mid-air, which was not something any individual dragon made a habit of." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "It wasn't the loneliness of command that was bothering him. It was the being fried-alive of command that was giving him problems." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "To his shame, Vimes realized that his legs were going to have nothing to do with a mad dash to drag [Lady Sybil] back. His pride didn't like that, but his body pointed out that it wasn't his pride that stood a reasonable chance of being thinly laminated to the nearest building." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "If there was anything that depressed [Vimes] more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "There was practically nothing the dragon could do to people that they had not, sooner or later, tried on one another, often with enthusiasm." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Say what you liked about Captain Vimes, he'd had style. It was cynical, black-nailed style, but he'd had it and [the rest of the Watch] didn't. He could read long words and add up. Even that was style, of a sort. He even got drunk in style." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn't make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300lbs of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? [Vimes]'d stared into the jaws of death three times; four if you counted telling Lord Vetinari to shut up." ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "The noun doesn't matter after an adjective like 'multiple.' Nothing good ever follows 'multiple.'" ~Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
  • "Ah, good man. Do you know anything about mating?" ~Lady Sybil Ramkin's first words to (then) Captain Samuel Vimes
  • "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that." ~Lord Havelock Vetinari
  • “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." ~Lord Havelock Vetinari to Captain Samuel Vimes
  • "No bloody flying newt sets fire to my city!…if anyone ever sets fire to this city, it's going to be me!" ~Captain Samuel Vimes

A Hat Full of Sky

  • “Ach, it’s a terrible thing for a man when his wumman gangs up on him wi’ a toad.” ~Rob Anybody
  • “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.” ~Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
  • “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ~Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Hogfather

  • "I'm laughing like [Tartarus] deep down, sir." ~Albert to Death
  • “Charity ain’t giving people what you wants to give, it’s giving people what they need to get.” ~Albert
  • DO I DETECT A NOTE OF UNSEASONAL GRUMPINESS? NO SUGAR PIGGYWIGGY FOR YOU, ALBERT. ~Death
  • MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF. ~Death
  • YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES [before you can believe the big ones]. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING….TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—AND YET YOU ACT LIKE THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. ~Death
  • THE WORLD WILL TEACH THEM ABOUT MONSTERS SOON ENOUGH. LET THEM REMEMBER THERE’S ALWAYS THE POKER. ~Death
  • SOME PEOPL E WILL DO ANYTHING FOR THE SHEER FASCINATION OF DOING IT. OR FOR FAME. OR BECAUSE THEY SHOLDN’T. ~Death
  • +++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++ ~Hex
  • "This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, 'Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?' When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr. Clever [Guy] in these parts...'" ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • "And someone landed abruptly in a snow drift and said, '[Darn]!' which is a terrible thing to say as your first word ever." ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • "The truth is out there, but lies are inside your head." ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • “It was amazing the mischief that could be caused in a house where no one in authority thought you existed.” ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • “It’s because [the senior wizards’] minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, [Ponder] told himself, that their mouths were allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.” ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • “[Violet] certainly did have a pleasant voice, Bilious told himself. It was just that in a funny way it grated, too. It was like listening to a talking flute.” ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • “Part of Bilious thought: I’m attracted to a girl who actually has to shut down all other brain functions in order to think about the order of the letters of the alphabet. On the other hand, she’s attracted to someone who’s wearing a toga that looks as though a family of weasels have had a party in it, so maybe I’ll stop this thought right here.” ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • "Between every rational moment were a billion irrational ones." ~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
  • “Funny thing, that. That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh.” ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • “…if it’s a kill-or-cure remedy then we are, given that the patient is practically immortal, probably onto a winner.” ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • “Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.” ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • “Careful! Careless talk creates lives!” ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • "We all have. It's called 'living'." ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully regarding near-death experiences
  • “I don’t actually think that I want to tell the Archchancellor that [Hex] stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don’t think I want to live in that kind of world.” ~Ponder Stibbons
  • "Don't worry, I'm on your side. A violent death is the last thing that'll happen to you." ~Mr. Teatime

Interesting Times

  • “Yes, whenever you come across a king where everyone says, ‘Oo, he was a good king all right,’ you can bet your sandals he was a great big bearded [jerk] who broke heads a lot and laughed about it. Hey? But some king who just passed decent little laws and read books and tried to look intelligent...’Oh,’ they say, ‘oh, he was all right, a bit wet, not what I’d call a proper king.’ That’s people for you.” ~Cohen the Barbarian
  • “Rincewind’s a weasel, but he’s our weasel.” ~Cohen the Barbarian
  • “Fate always wins… At least, when people stick to the rules.” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “Rincewind could scream* for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. [*This is important. Inexperienced travelers might think that ‘Aargh!’ is universal, but in Betrobi it means ‘highly enjoyable’ and in Howondaland it means, variously, ‘I would like to eat your foot,’ ‘Your wife is a big hippo,’ and ‘Hello, Thinks Mr. Purple Cat.’ One particular tribe has a fearsome reputation for cruelty merely because prisoners appear, to them, to be shouting ‘Quick! Extra boiling oil!’]” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “The world had too many heroes and didn’t need another one. Whereas the world had only one Rincewind and he owed it to the world to keep this one alive for as long as possible.” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “Once again a foot kicked Rincewind in the kidneys, making its usual explicit request in the Esperanto of brutality.” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “Once you were in the hands of a Grand Vizier, you were dead. Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: ‘Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.’” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “Of course, it was only a temporary measure, but Rincewind had always considered that life was no more than a series of temporary measures strung together.” ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • "There is a curse. They say, 'May you live in interesting times.'" ~Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
  • “We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.” ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • “I hate it when people are nice to me. It means something bad is going to happen.” ~Rincewind
  • “I’ll tell you this! I’d rather trust me than history! Oh, [smeg], did I just say that?” ~Rincewind
  • “From; that was the most important factor in any mindless escape. You were always running from. To could look after itself.” ~Rincewind’s Rules to Live By
  • “I don’t see why everyone depends on me. I’m not dependable. Even I don’t depend on me, and I’m me.” ~Rincewind
  • “Hit a man too hard and you can only hit him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.” ~The Thieves’ Guild Rules to Live By

Jingo

  • "I've only been a woman ten minutes and already I hate you male [jerks]." ~Corporal "Nobby" Nobbs
  • “And, finally, he kept Leonard around because the man was easy to talk to. He never understood what Lord Vetinari was talking about, he had a world view about as complex as a concussed duckling, and, above all, never really paid attention. This made him an excellent confidant. After all, when you seek advice from some one it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.” ~Terry Pratchett, Jingo
  • "Jugglers will tell you that juggling with items that are identical is always easier than a mixture of all shapes and sizes. This is even the case with chainsaws, although of course when the juggler misses the first chainsaw it is only the start of his problems. Some more will be along very shortly." ~Terry Pratchett, Jingo
  • “One of the advantages of horses that people often point out is that they very seldom explode. Almost never, in my experience, apart from that unfortunate occurrence in the hot summer months a few years ago.” ~Lord Havelock Vetinari
  • “There may be a lot of things I’m not good at, but at least I don’t treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey…” ~Commander Samuel Vimes

The Last Continent

  • “The way I see it, I’m more indigenous than [indigenous peoples]. I earned my indigenuity, I did.” ~Fair Go Dibbler
  • "People don't *live* on the Disc anymore than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls. Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they *live* elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the center of their heads." ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • "There is a such thing as an edible, nay delicious, meat pie floater, its mushy peas of just the right consistency, its tomato sauce piquant in its cheekiness, its pie filling tending even towards named parts of the animal. There are platonic burgers made of beef instead of cow lips and hooves... Even so, there is no excuse for putting pineapple on pizza." ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “But even ordinary books are dangerous….A man sits in some museum and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke. Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “So something was going right for [Rincewind]. Out here in the red-hot wilderness something wanted him to stay alive. This was a worrying thought. No one ever wanted him to stay alive for something nice.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “There are times when it does not pay to declare ones sanity, and Rincewind realized that he’d be mad to do so now. Anyway, he could talk to kangaroos and find cheese and chutney rolls in the desert. There were times when you had to look wobbly facts in the face.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “When people like Mrs. Whitlow use [the term ‘savages’] they are not, for some inexplicable reason, trying to suggest that the subjects have a rich oral tradition, a complex system of tribal rights and a deep respect for the spirits of their ancestors. They are implying the kind of behaviour more generally associated, oddly enough, with people wearing a full suit of clothes, often with the same sort of insignia.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “The thing about late-night cookery was that it made sense at the time. It always had some logic behind it. It just wasn’t the kind of logic you’d use around midday.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
  • “Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.” ~Rincewind

The Last Hero

  • "Ankh-Morpork, we have an orangutan…" ~Leonard de Quirm
  • "Ponder nodded. He had a quick mind when it came to mechanical detail, and he'd already formed a mental picture. Now a mental eraser would be useful." ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
  • “On the Kite, the situation was being ‘workshopped’. This is the means by which people who don’t know anything get together to pool their ignorance.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
  • "Lord Vetinari looked at Ponder without speaking. He could deal with most types of mind, but the one apparently operating Ponder Stibbons was of a sort he had yet to find the handles on. It was best to nod and smile and give it the bits of machinery it seemed to think were so important, lest it run amok." ~Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
  • “It takes guts to run away, you know. Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.” ~Rincewind
  • "I think it's because I've got an active imagination." ~Ponder Stibbons when asked why he lacked in the "stuff of heroes" department
  • "If you would all stand in front of the flag and smile, please...that means the corners of your mouth go up, Rincewind..." ~Ponder Stibbons

The Light Fantastic

  • “Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out.” ~The shopkeeper
  • "No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person." ~The shopkeeper
  • “I often don’t know where my Luggage is, that’s what being a tourist is all about.” ~Twoflower

Lords and Ladies

  • “You ain’t supposed to understand the jokes, this is a play.” ~Jason Ogg
  • “The point was that Granny Weatherwax had a feeling she was going to die. This was beginning to get on her nerves.” ~Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
  • “She seemed to have spent her whole life trying to make herself small, trying to be polite, apologizing when people walked over her, trying to be good-mannered. And what had happened? People had treated her as if she was small and polite and good-mannered.” ~Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
  • “That’s the thing about being alive. You’re alive to enjoy it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
  • “It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It’s a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.” ~Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
  • “The graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely.” ~Ponder Stibbons
  • “You can’t say ‘if this didn’t happen then that would have happened’ because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say ‘If only I’d...’ because you could be wishing for anything. The point is you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it. So I don’t.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little [jerks] they are.” ~Granny Weatherwax explaining the importance of style
  • “Don’t hold with schools. They gets in the way of education.” ~Granny Weatherwax

Making Money

  • "If you upset Vetinari again you will have a wonderful opportunity to never have to buy another hat." ~Adora Belle "Spike" Dearheart
  • "It can't be from a friend. Everyone I think of as a friend can spell." ~Moist von Lipwig
  • "The world is full of things worth more than gold. But we dig the damn stuff up and then bury it in a different hole. Where's the sense in that? What are we, magpies? Is it all about the gleam? Good heavens, potatoes are worth more than gold!" ~Moist von Lipwig
  • "This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one." ~Moist von Lipwig
  • "You get a wonderful view from the point of no return." ~Moist von Lipwig
  • "'You mean that if you do overtime you have to do more overtime to pay for it?' said Moist, still pondering how illogical logical thinking can be if a big enough committee is doing it." ~Terry Pratchett, Making Money
  • "Mr. Lipwig had been in trouble, but it seemed to Igor that the trouble hit Mr. Lipwig like a big wave hitting a flotilla of ducks. Afterward, there was no wave but there was still a lot of duck." ~Terry Pratchett, Making Money

Maskerade

  • “Of course, Granny Weatherwax made a great play of her independence and self-reliance. But the point about that kind of stuff was that you needed someone around to be proudly independent and self-reliant at.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “If people wanted to go around teaching people lessons, other people should remember that those people knew a thing or two about people.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “The people of Lancre thought that marriage was a very serious step that ought to be done properly, so they practiced quite a lot.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “Granny Weatherwax was not a jouster in the lists of love, but, as an intelligent onlooker, she knew how the game was played.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “There seemed to be so much to do that she couldn’t bring herself to do any of it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
  • “What sort of person sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.” ~Salzella
  • “There are few things in the world more expensive than ballet shoes. Violins happen to be among them.” ~Salzella
  • “Oh, them as makes the endings don’t get them.” ~Granny Weatherwax

Men at Arms

  • "Don't stick your nose where someone can pull it off and eat it." ~Sergeant Fred Colon
  • "Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage." ~Gaspode
  • "It takes a very special and strong minded kind of atheist to jump up and down...and shout, 'Oh, random fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!' or 'Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!'" ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know." ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable." ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "[Colon]'d got used to simple Carrot. Complicated Carrot was as unnerving as being savaged by a duck." ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "When you're swinging a spiky ball on a chain, the only realistic option is to keep moving. Standing still is an interesting but brief demonstration of a spiral in action." ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "He wasn't exactly an atheist, because atheism was a non-survival on a world with several thousand gods. He just didn't like any of them very much…" ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "Carrot had been behind that, sure enough. Vimes had grown to recognize that blindness to the position of 'i's and 'e's and that wonton cruelty to the common comma." ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
  • "But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten year's time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." ~The Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness
  • "Funny how I never feel really alive until someone tries to kill me." ~Captain Samuel Vimes
  • "Nine in the morning? What sort of time is that to get up? I don't normally get up until the afternoon's got the shine worn off!" ~Captain Samuel Vimes

Missing, Presumed…?! (aka Mortality Bytes!)

  • “I seem to meet more crazy people than sheer coincidence would allow." ~Rincewind
  • "A length of rope. Sort of like...string on steroids." ~Rincewind
  • "I am NOT a cartoon. I'm just dimensionally challenged." ~Rincewind

Monstrous Regiment

  • “It’s all trickery. They keep you down and when the [tick] off another country, you have to fight for them! It’s only your country when they want you to get killed!” ~”Tonker” Halter
  • “I think there’s no rule to stop me beating seven kinds of [stuff] out of you until you tell me why you came here and when the rest of your mates are going to arrive. And that may take me some time, sir, because up until now I’ve only ever discovered five types of [stuff].” ~Sergeant Jackrum
  • “Good evening, gentleman! Please pay attention. I am a reformed vampire, which is to say, I am a bundle of suppressed instincts held together with spit and coffee. It would be wrong to say that violence does not come easily to me. It’s not tearing your throats out that doesn’t come easily to me. Please don’t make it any harder.” ~Maladict
  • “It’s all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that’s all. People see what they think is there.” ~Polly Perks
  • “Why me? Do I have a little sign on me saying ‘tell me your troubles’?” ~Polly Perks
  • ”It’s a folk song, it starts with ‘’twas,’ it takes place in May, QED, it’s about sex. Is a milkmaid involved? I bet she is.” ~Polly Perks
  • “Most of the vampire families were highly nobby. You never knew who was connected to who...not just to who, in fact, but to whom. ‘Whoms’ were likely to be far more trouble than you common, everyday ‘who’.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “The four lesser apocalyptical horsemen of Panic, Bewilderment, Ignorance, and Shouting took control of the room, to Corpral Strappi’s obscene glee.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Polly...cursed herself for the idiot bravado. It must have been the socks talking.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “There have been better attempts at marching, and they have been made by penguins.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Anyone who’d tried to unroll a soggy, bleached sausage that’d once been a banknote never wanted to do it twice.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “It took a special kind of man to cut his sword hand with his own sword.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world, other people are also people, while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “His rabbity features looked unusually determined, as if a hamster had spotted a gap in its treadmill.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “He was teaching Wazzer some of the finer points of using a high-performance pistol crossbow, especially the one about not turning it around with it cocked and saying ‘w-what is this bit for, Sarge?’” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “You needed a lack of graphic imagination to talk about personal issues with an Igor.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Maladict dropped his crossbow, which fired straight up into the air,* and sat down with his head in his hands. (*And failed to hit anything, especially a duck. This is so unusual in situations like this that it must be reported under new humour regulations. If it had hit a duck, which quacked and then landed on somebody’s head, this would, of course, have been very droll and would certainly have been reported. Instead, the arrow drifted in the breeze a little on the way and landed in an oak tree thirty feet away, where it missed a squirrel.)” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “There was an old, very old Borogravian song with more Zs and Vs in it than any lowlander could pronounce. It was called ‘Plogviehze!’ It meant ‘The Sun Has Risen! Let’s Make War!’ You needed a special kind of history to get all that in one word.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Ankh Morpork had overtaken cunning a thousand years ago, had sped past devious, had left artful far behind, and had now, by a roundabout route, arrived at straightforward.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Tea was an amazingly useful thing. It gave you an excuse to talk to anyone.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “It is an established fact that, despite everything society can do, girls of seven are magnetically attracted to the colour pink.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Stopping a battle is much harder than starting it. Starting it only requires you to shout ‘Attack!’, but when you want to stop it, everyone is busy.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “The pen might not be mightier than the sword, but maybe the printing press was heavier than the siege engine.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Life was a process of finding out how far you could go too far, and you could probably go too far in finding out how far you could go.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “If the landslide is big enough, even square pebbles will roll.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Caring for small things had to start with caring for big things, and maybe the world wasn’t big enough.” ~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
  • “Best of luck, lads. You’ll walk with Death every day, but I’ve seen ‘im and he’s been known to wink. And remember: fill your boots with soup.” ~Corporal Threeparts Scallot
  • “What’s the good of me trying to teach you stuff if you’re going to keep on asking questions?” ~Corporal Strappi
  • “I would like to eat chocolates in a great big room where the world is a different place.” ~”Lofty” Tewt
  • “Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane?” ~Commander Samuel Vimes

Mort

  • “I wish I’d get out of my head, it’s quite crowded enough with me in here.” ~Mort
  • “But remember, if you ever need you, you’re always around.” ~Mort
  • “Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.” ~Terry Pratchett, Mort
  • “There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you’d really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.” ~Terry Pratchett, Mort

Moving Pictures

  • "He tended to smile a lot, in a faintly puzzled way. This gave people the impression that he was slightly more intelligent than they were. In fact, he was usually trying to work out what they had just said." ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • "...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened." ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “If the abnormal goes on long enough it becomes the normal.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor had passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out on the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labor.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “People who didn’t apply themselves to the facts in hand might have thought that Victor Tugelbend would be fat and unhealthy. In fact, he was undoubtedly the most athletically inclined student in the University. Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and he kept himself in trim because doing things with decent muscles was far less effort than trying to achieve things with bags of flab.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “It was always best, [Victor] had learned, never to try to follow the plot of any click you were in, and in any case Soll wasn’t just shooting back to front, but sides to middle as well. It was totally confusing, just like real life.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “Messin’ around with girls who’re in thrall to Creatures from the Void never works out, take my word for it. You’d never know what you were going to wake up next to.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “’But look, that can’t be right,’ said Ginger, in the small voice of one trying to be reasonable while madness is breaking down the door with a cleaver.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “What was it they said about the gods? They wouldn’t exist if there weren’t people to believe in them? And that applied to everything. Reality was what went on in people’s heads.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “Reality didn’t have to be real. Maybe if conditions were right, it just had to be what people believed...” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “The rope continued its swing. There was a noise exactly like a rubber sack full of butter hitting a stone slab and this was followed, after a moment or two, by a very quiet ‘oook’.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “Poets long ago gave up trying to describe [Ankh-Morpork]. Now the more cunning ones try to excuse it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
  • “It’s very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures.” ~Silverfish
  • “Gosh. Isn’t life interesting when you see it from someone else’s perspective...?” ~Victor Tugelbend
  • “Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job. I bet even people like Cohen the Barbarian get up in the morning thinking, ‘Oh, no, not another day of crushing the jeweled thrones of the world beneath my sandaled feet.’” ~Victor Tugelbend
  • “And don’t you go around using that calm and reasonable tone of voice with me. I hate it when people go around being calm and reasonable at me.” ~Ginger Withel

Night Watch

  • "Coppers would be too suspicious of anyone calling themselves a god of policemen to believe in one." ~Captain Carrot Ironfounderson
  • “You’re an interesting man, Sergeant. You make enemies like a craftsman.” ~Dr. Lawn
  • “Well done! Consciousness to sarcasm in five seconds!” ~Lu Tze
  • "Vimes's imagination actually shut down at this point." ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • "Nature is bountiful where idiots are concerned." ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • "The key to winning, as always, was looking as if you had every right, nay, duty to be where you were. It helped if you could also suggest in every line of your body that no one else had any rights to be doing anything, anywhere, whatsoever." ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • "Someone was slicing toward young Sam; Vimes brought a sword down on the arm in true self-defense." ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “Trouble was, you couldn’t shoot someone for having an annoying laugh.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “Vimes snapped, but very gently.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “’Twenty-five dollars or I walk out that door,’ he said. It was probably a phrase never ever said before by any prisoner anywhere on any world.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “Someone cleared his throat with malice aforethought.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “[Vimes’] glare ran from face to face, causing most of the squad to do an immediate impression of the Floorboard and Ceiling Inspectors Synchronized Observation Team.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “It wasn’t easy, living in the past. You couldn’t whack someone for what they were going to do, or for what the world was going to find out later. You couldn’t warn people, either. You didn’t know what could change the future, but if he understood things right, history tended to spring back into shape. All you could change was the bits around the edges, the fine details. There was nothing he could do about the big stuff.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I knew then what I know now’? But when you got older, you found out that you now wasn’t you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “Despite his barely basic grasp of the language, Mr. Sun’s expression suggested very clearly that the three-stripe, one-crown copper in front of him had dropped in from the planet Idiot.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • “Rust was always a man to interrupt an answer with a demand for the answer he was, in fact, interrupting.” ~Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • "Oh dear. Why did I wait until I was married to become strangely attractive to powerful women? Why didn't it happen to me when I was sixteen? I could have done with it then." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "Dark sarcasm ought to be taught in schools." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "I'm going to make the stupid decision because I don't want to look bad in front of myself. Try explaining that to anyone who hasn't had a couple of drinks." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • “…here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.” ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "When Mr. Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend." ~what Commander Samuel Vimes told Sergeant Detritus about Mister Safety Catch

Pyramids

  • “Dios, First Minister and high priest among high priests, wasn’t a naturally religious man. It wasn’t a desirable quality in a high priest, it affected your judgment, made you unsound. Start believing in things and the whole business became a farce.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightforward and easily understood; medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn’t going to get anywhere if people could understand it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “’I have learned seven languages,’ said Teppic, secure in the knowledge that the actual marks he had achieved in three of them would remain concealed in the ledgers of the Guild.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “[Ptaclusp] wasn’t used to kings talking to him as though he was a human being. He felt obscurely that it wasn’t right.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “It was a strange feeling, to be creeping across the roof of your own palace, trying to avoid your own guards, engaged in a mission in direct contravention of your own decree and knowing that if you were caught you would have yourself thrown to the sacred crocodiles. After all, he’d apparently already instructed that he was to be shown no mercy if he was captured.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “The camel looked along its nose at Teppic. Its expression made it clear that of all the riders in all the world it would least like to ride it, he was right at the top of the list. However, camels look like that at everyone. Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race. They hate every member of it, without making any distinctions for rank or creed.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “[Dios’] eyes fixed on Teppic’s face, and Teppic realised that the high priest was, indeed, truly mad. It was the rare kind of madness caused by being yourself for so long that habits of sanity have etched themselves into the brain.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “Dil was realising that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed anymore.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “Ptraci’s literal-mindedness meant that innocent sentences had to be carefully examined before being sent out into the world.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying. It was much simpler with camels.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “It is astonishingly difficult to walk with legs full of straw when the brain doing the directing is in a pot ten feet away.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn’t climb out of one.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “It is known to science that there are many more dimensions than the classical four. Scientists say that these don’t normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either that the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along.” ~Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
  • “The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There’s no end to the [things]. Do you know how [mad] that makes me?” ~Pthagonal
  • "Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid." ~Teppicymon XXVIII
  • “I’m sure sacred cats don’t leave dead ibises under the bed. And I’m certain that sacred cats that live surrounded by endless sand don’t come indoors and do it in the king’s sandals.” ~Teppicymon XXVIII
  • “But wherever [other people] are, no matter how mightily they try, no matter how magnificent the effort, they surely can’t be as godawfully stupid as us. I mean, we work at it. We were given a spark of it to start with, but over hundreds of thousands of years we’ve really improved on it.” ~Teppicymon XXVIII
  • “’I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire.’ Screams, flames, people running for safety...” ~Teppicymon XXVIII

Small Gods

  • “There’s no point in believing in things that exist.” ~Didactylos
  • “Anyone stupid enough to expect us to trust him in these circumstances must be trustworthy. He’d be too stupid to be deceitful.” ~Didactylos
  • “Well, the way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.” ~Didactylos
  • “But that doesn’t mean I know everything.” ~The Great God Om in response to “But you…you’re omnicognisant.”
  • “Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I’m a god!” ~The Great God Om
  • “Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst…Because it often happens to them, I suppose.” ~The Great God Om
  • “That’s a funny thing. Winners never talk about glorious victories. That’s because they’re the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterward. It’s only the losers who have glorious victories.” ~The Great God Om
  • “[A philosopher is] someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting.” ~The Great God Om
  • “There was something creepy about that boy. It was the way he looked at you when you were talking, as if he was listening.” ~Brother Nhumrod
  • “That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “It didn’t matter if you fooled yourself provided you didn’t let yourself know it, and did it well.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “He looked nervous, like an atheist in a thunderstorm.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “The trouble with being a god is that you’ve got no one to pray to.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “Gods don’t like people not doing much. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “Words are the litmus paper of the mind. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word ‘commence’ in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say ‘Enter,’ don’t stop to pack.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “The Ephebian garrison had declared somewhat nervously that slavery would henceforth be abolished, which infuriated the slaves. What would be the point of saving up to become free if you couldn’t own slaves afterwards?” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “As St. Ungulant preached to any who would listen, there were plus points in being a madman. People hesitated to stop you, in case it made things worse.” ~Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
  • “Life’s a beach…And then you die.” ~The Sea Queen
  • “This doesn’t change anything, you know! Don’t think you can get round me by existing!” ~Simony, a devout atheist, when confronted by the Great God Om
  • “Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they’d left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you’d go mad.” ~Urn
  • “We are, therefore we am.” ~Xeno

Soul Music

  • "He can't stop us. We're on a mission from Glod." ~Cliff, or The Artist Formerly Known as Lias
  • “I am a troll, so I can be prejudiced against trolls.” ~Cliff, aka Lias
  • “In my experience, what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.” ~Glod Glodson
  • "The universe was bad enough without people poking it." ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • "You didn't get the best gigs if you were a murderer. You probably had to play the viola." ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • “In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She’ much prefer to read a good book.” ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • “It was a free country. People could like daffodils if they wanted to. The just should not, in Susan’s very definite and precise opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page to say so.” ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • “[Susan] got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • ”She’d always known she was different. Much more aware of the world, when it was obvious that most people went through it with their eyes shut and their brains set to ‘simmer.’” ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • “Deafness doesn’t prevent composers hearing the music. It prevents them hearing the distractions.” ~Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
  • "Something bloody stupid's been going on here, and I'm going to wait quite patiently until the Dean owns up." ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • “If [Death] really picked things up from humans, had he tried insanity? It was very popular, after all.” ~Susan Sto-Helit

Sourcery

  • "Never enter an [tail]-kicking contest with a porcupine." ~Cohen the Barbarian
  • "I do not see why I should hurt him. He looks so harmless. Like an angry rabbit." ~Coin on Rincewind
  • "It is at a time like this, with Rincewind and Conina probably about to be the victims of a murderous attack, and Coin about to address the assembled cowering wizards on the subject of treachery, and the Disc about to fall under a magical dictatorship, that it is worth mentioning the subject of poetry and inspiration." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "It has already been indicated that [Rincewind] had the kind of instinct for danger usually found only in certain small rodents, and it was currently battering on the side of his skull in an attempt to run away and hide somewhere." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "In a truly magical universe everything has its opposite. For example, there's anti-light. That's not the same as darkness, because darkness is merely the absence of light. Anti-light is what you get if you pass through darkness and out the other side. On the same basis, a state of knurdness isn't like sobriety. By comparison, sobriety is like having a bath in cotton wool. Knurdness strips away all illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then, after they've screamed a bit, they make sure they never get knurd again." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "There are eight levels of wizardry on the Disc; after sixteen years Rincewind has failed to achieve even level one. I n fact it is the consideration of some of his tutors that he is incapable even of achieving level zero, which most normal people are born at; to put it another way, it has been suggested that when Rincewind dies the average occult ability of the human race will actually go up by a fraction." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "The truth isn't easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find…" ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "Many people who had gotten to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner's canary and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "It didn't look like the kind of snow that whispers down gently in the pit of the night and in the morning turns the landscape into a glittering wonderland of uncommon and ethereal beauty. It looked like the kind of snow that intends to make the world as bloody cold as possible." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "In Klatch they take their mythology seriously. It's only real life they don't believe." ~Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
  • "Are you alive? If you're not, I'd prefer it if you didn't answer." ~Rincewind
  • "…to call his understanding of magical theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice." ~One of Rincewind's tutors

Thief of Time

  • “I’ve actually got a piece of paper that says I’m not [insane], you know. Not many people have one of those!” ~Jeremy Clockson
  • “Things either exist or they don’t. I’m very clear about that. I have medicine.” ~Jeremy Clockson
  • “We can find only one hundred and three names for green before the color becomes noticeably either blue or yellow.” ~Miss Crimson
  • “Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you.” ~Koan 97 of The Way
  • “It is essential for humans to use the personal pronoun. It divides the universe into two parts. The darkness behind the eyes, where the little voice is, and everything else. It is…a horrible feeling. It is like…being questioned all the time.” ~Lady LeJean
  • “There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.” ~Unity LeJean
  • “But I can’t kill someone just because they’ve asked me to!” ~Lobsang Ludd
  • “Three times, eh? That’s a lot of times to go extinct. I mean, most species only manage it once, don’t they?” ~Lobsang Ludd
  • “The wise man does not seek enlightenment, he waits for it. So while I was waiting, it occurred to me that seeking perplexity might be more fun. After all, enlightenment begins where perplexity ends. And I found perplexity. And a kind of enlightenment, too. I had not been [in Ankh-Morpork] five minutes, for example, when some men in an alley tried to enlighten me of what little I possessed, giving me a valuable lesson in the ridiculousness of material things.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “They can be dangerous, things that don’t look dangerous. Not looking dangerous is what makes them dangerous.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “The only defense is to attack well, I’m told.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “When in doubt, chose to live.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “Y’know, most of what you get taught is lies. It has to be. Sometimes if you get the truth all at once, you can’t understand it.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “It’s very hard to get things done when you’re a supreme ruler. There’s too many people in the way, mucking things up.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “I’ll tell you, the day someone pulls the plug out of the bottom of the universe, the chain will lead all the way back to Ankh-Morpork and some [idiot] saying, ‘I just wanted to see what would happen.’” ~Lu-Tze
  • “Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break them.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “In life, as in breakfast cereal, it is always best to read the instructions on the box.” ~Lu-Tze
  • “There is no educating a smart boy.” ~The Master of Novices
  • “Seeing things a human shouldn’t have to see makes us human.” ~Gytha “Nanny” Ogg
  • “Insanity depended on your point of view, he always said, and if it was the view through your own underpants then everything looked fine.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “The apprentice gave him a bleary look. It was too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning. That was the only thing he currently knew for sure.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Sometimes he had to cough to attract the customer’s attention. That being said, sometimes Jeremy had to cough to attract the attention of his reflection when he was shaving.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Mr. Soak was a friend, which in Jeremy’s limited social vocabulary meant ‘someone I speak to once or twice a week.’” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “The assent of mankind must have been a boon to [the Auditors of Time]. At last there was a species that could be persuaded to shoot itself in the foot.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Igor had to admit it. When it came to getting weird things done, sane beat mad hands down.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “The Auditors hated questions. They hated them almost as much as they hated decisions, and they hated decisions almost as much as they hated the idea of the individual personality. But what they hated most was things moving around randomly.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “A species as crazy as [humans] couldn’t be allowed to survive.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Always put off until tomorrow something which, tomorrow, you could put off until, let’s say, next year.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Among the very worst words that can be heard by anyone high in the air, the pair known as ‘uh-oh’ possibly combines the maximum of bowel-knotting terror with the minimum wastage of breath.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Lu-Tze had long considered that everything happens for a reason, except possibly football.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “She was being harassed by her internal organs.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Susan was sensible. It was, she knew, a major character flaw. It did not make you popular, or cheerful, and–this seemed to her to be the most unfair bit–it didn’t even make you right.“ ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Wizards and philosophers had found Chaos, which is Kaos with his hair combed and a tie on, and had found in the epitome of disorder a new order undreamed of. There are different kinds of rules. From the simple comes the complex, and from the complex comes a different kind of simplicity. Chaos is order in a mask…” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Lu-Tze regarded the speaker. She looked like a society lady who had just had a really bad day in a threshing machine.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Fear, anger, envy…emotions bring you to life, which is a brief period just before you die.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Even with nougat, you can have a perfect moment.” ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
  • “Eat…oh, good grief...Eat…’a delicious fondant sugar crème infused with delightfully rich and creamy raspberry filling wrapped in mysterious dark chocolate’…you grey [jerks]!” ~Susan Sto Helit
  • “Questions don’t have to make sense, Vincent. But answers do.” ~Susan Sto Helit
  • “Sometimes I really think people ought to have to pass a proper exam before they’re allowed to have children.” ~Susan Sto Helit
  • “You look human, too. Human is a very popular look in these parts. You’d be amazed.” ~Susan Sto Helit
  • “In this world, after everyone panics, there’s always got to be someone to tip the wee out of the shoe.” ~Susan Sto Helit
  • “Think of everything. It’s an everyday word. But ‘everything’ means…everything. It’s a much bigger word than ‘universe.’ And everything contains all possible things that can happen at all possible times in all possible worlds.” ~Wen

Thud!

  • "I'm glad to see you up and about again. This is a historical day! And you still have a soul, it appears! Isn't that nice?" ~Grag Bashfullsson
  • YOU SEE, YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE, WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR-VIMES EXPERIENCE. DON'T MIND ME. CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING. I HAVE A BOOK. ~Death
  • "Vimes unfolded the copy of the Times that Cheery had left on his desk. He always read it at work, to catch up on the news that Willikins had thought unsafe to hear whilst shaving." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not...what do they call it...go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go postal. But with precision." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "[Vimes] ought to be springing into action. Once upon a time, he would have done. But now, perhaps he should take those precious moments to work out what he should do before he sprang." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "What bits of [Vimes'] body weren't aching? He checked. No, there seemed to be none. His ribs were carrying the melody of pain, but knees, elbows, and head were all adding trills and arpeggios. Every time he shifted to ease the agony, it moved somewhere else. His head ached as if someone was hammering on his eyeballs." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "He'd hoped that it might evaporate if he didn't think about it." ~Terry Pratchett, Thud!
  • "Don't try to put me at my ease, Miss von Humpeding. It makes me nervous when people do that. It's not as though I have any ease to be out at." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "Everyone wants something from Vimes, even though I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. [Tartarus], I'm probably a spoon." ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "I don't gallivant! I've never gallivanted. I don't know how to vant! I don't even have a galli!" ~Commander Samuel Vimes
  • "No, definitely no pocus. Possibly a little hocus." ~Commander Samuel Vimes to Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully

The Truth

  • “Otto told the man from the Guild that he’d break his pledge if he saw him here again.” ~Sacharissa Cripslock (Otto is a vampire who practices teetotalism)
  • “Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes. Sometimes they’re the same person.” ~Sacharissa Cripslock
  • “This is a newspaper, isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.” ~Sacharissa Cripslock
  • DO NOT PUT YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. ~Death
  • “Mister Vimes is going to go round the twist. He’s going to go totally Librarian-poo. He’s going to invent new ways of being angry just so’s he can try them out on you—” ~”Deep Bone”
  • "Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench." ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • "'Are you...all right, Otto?' said William, realizing that this was a winning entrant in the Really Stupid Things to Say contest." ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth, after Otto Chriek has been decapitated
  • "...the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane. *[This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.]" ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “The universe requires everything to be observed, lest it cease to exist.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “An engraved page was an engraved page, complete and unique. But if you took the leaden letters that had previously been used to set the words of a god, and then used them to set a cookery book, what did that do to the holy wisdom? For that matter, what would it do to the pie?” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “Words resemble fish in that some specialized ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are only found in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “The brain works fast when it thinks it’s about to be cut in half.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “William wondered why he always disliked people who said ‘no offense meant.’ Maybe it was because they found it easier to say ‘no offense meant’ than actually refrain from giving offense.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “William vaguely remembered something someone had once said: the only thing more dangerous than a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “The way of the truthful-by-nature is as a bicycle race in a pair of sandpaper underpants.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “He wasn’t just out on a limb here, he was dangerously out of the tree.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “Just for a moment, there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, [William] thought. It’s one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise, but if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It’s like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “Several of the dwarves slapped their thighs, half turned away, and did the usual little pantomime that people do to indicate that they just can’t believe someone else could be so [darn] stupid.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “Sacharissa looked a little disappointed. She’d been a respectable young woman for some time. In certain people, that means there’s a lot of dammed-up disreputability just waiting to burst out.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “A potato can be a great help in times of trial.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • “The mountains of madness have many plateaus of sanity.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Truth
  • "Another fifty dollars? That'll make it fifteen dollars!" ~Arnold Sideways
  • “That –ing zombie is going to end up on the end of a couple of –ing handy and versatile kebab skewers. An’ then I’m gonna put an edge on this –ing spatula. An’ then...then I’m gonna get medieval on his [tail feathers]...I thought maybe a maypole. An’ then a display of country dancing, land tillage under the three-field system, several plagues, and, if my –ing hand ain’t too tired, the invention of the –ing horse collar.” ~Mr. Tulip
  • “I reckon...to be that sorry, you got to take a –ing good run at it.” ~Mr. Tulip
  • “Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things...well, new things aren’t what they expect.” ~Lord Havelock Vetinari
  • “Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It’s the only way to make progress.” ~Lord Havelock Vetinari
  • “[Detritus]’s a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don’t often hear it.” ~William de Worde
  • “Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers...They’re still some around, aren’t there? Besides, [Slant]’s a zombie. If you cut him in half, both bits will sue you.” ~William de Worde
  • “Aha, that’s a wallpaper word. When people say clearly something, that means there’s a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all.” ~William de Worde

The Wee Free Men

  • “Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.” ~Granny Aching
  • “I’m me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don’t understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That’s the kind of person I am!” ~Tiffany Aching
  • “What’s magic, eh? Just wavin’ a stick an’ sayin’ a few wee magical words. An’ what’s so cleaver aboot that, eh? But lookin’ at things, really lookin’ at ‘em, and then workin’ ‘em oout, now, that’s a real skill.” ~Rob Anybody
  • “Things ha’ come to a pretty pass, ye ken, if people are going to leave stuff like that aroound where innocent people could accidentally smash the door doon and lever the bars aside and take the big chain off ‘f the cupboard and pick the lock and drink it!” ~Rob Anybody
  • “You could read the Nac Mac Feegle like a book. And it would be a big, simple book with lots of pictures of Spot the Dog and a Big Red Ball and one or two short sentences on each page.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
  • “They were in every colour sweets can be, such as Not-Really-Raspberry Red, Fake-Lemon Yellow, Curiously-Chemical Orange, Some-Kind-Of-Acidy Green, and Who-Knows-What Blue.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
  • “Pictsies seemed very hard to kill. Perhaps believing you were already dead made you immune.” ~Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
  • “Now...if you trust in yourself...and believe in your dreams...and follow your star...you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.” ~Miss Perspicacia Tick

Witches Abroad

  • “I don’t see how it can be thieving if you don’t pay anyway.” ~Magrat Garlick on inflated prices
  • “All anyone gets in a mirror is themselves. But what you gets in a good gumbo is everything.” ~Mrs. Gogol
  • “It’s far too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning.” ~Nanny Ogg
  • “It’s [Granny Weatherwax’s] eggo. Everyone’s got one o’ them. A eggo. And she’s got a great big one. Of course, that’s all part of bein’ a witch, having a big eggo.” ~Nanny Ogg
  • “If that’s what bein’ bad does to you, I could of done with some of that years ago. The wages of sin is death, but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.” ~Nanny Ogg
  • “You don’t build a better world by choppin’ heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.” ~Nanny Ogg
  • “Granny really couldn’t be having at all with Nanny Ogg, who was her best friend.” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “…happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks gravitate to gravity.” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “Humanity’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.” ~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
  • “You can be as self-assertive as you like, just so long as you do what you’re told.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you’re listenin’ to a nice song about…about cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about…about something else entirely. You can’t trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “No point in imagining anything. Things are bad enough as they are.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “I ain’t against adventure, in moderation, but not when I’m eatin’.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “I reckon after you’ve had a busy life, you ort to be able to relax a bit when you’re dead.” ~Granny Weatherwax
  • “There’s a billion places like home. But only one of ‘em’s where you live.” ~Granny Weatherwax

Wyrd Sisters

  • I SAID WAS. IT’S CALLED THE PAST TENSE. YOU’LL SOON GET USED TO IT. ~Death
  • LIVING PEOPLE AREN’T ALLOWED TO BE GHOSTS. I’M SORRY. ~Death
  • “But I think you have a right to know what it is you’re not being told.” ~The Fool
  • “There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn’t rule the world. They’re called witches and wizards.” ~Magrat Garlick
  • “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.” ~Magrat Garlick
  • “You are also dead, so I wouldn’t aspire to hold any opinions if I was you.” ~Gytha “Nanny” Ogg to the late King Verence I
  • “Royalty goes eccentric far better than the likes of you and me.” ~Gytha “Nanny” Ogg
  • "When you break rules, break 'em good and hard." ~Nanny Ogg
  • "Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages." ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “No gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “It was a rich and wonderful voice, with every diphthong gliding beautifully into place. It was a golden brown voice. It the Creator of the multiverse had a voice, it was a voice such as this. If it had a drawback, it was that it wasn’t a voice you could use, for example, for ordering coal. Coal ordered by this voice would become diamonds.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “Actors had a habit of filling all the space around them.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “Like most Ramtoppers, Granny lived her life via the back door. There were only three times in your life when it was proper to come through the front door, and you were carried every time.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “It is very difficult to be prejudiced against creatures seven feet tall and who can bite through walls, at least for very long.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “The theater worried [Granny]. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed substantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.” ~Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
  • “Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact.” ~Esmerelda ”Granny” Weatherwax
  • “The dead shouldn’t kill the living. It could be a dangerous wossname, precedent. We’d all be outnumbered, for one thing.” ~Esmerelda “Granny” Weatherwax

Quotes that I’ve forgotten which book they’re from

  • “They always gives me bath salts. 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?” ~Corporal Nobby Nobbs
  • "Talent just defines what you do. It doesn't define who you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything." ~Rincewind
  • “Who let a student into my university?!” ~Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully
  • “Mythology’s jus the folktales of the people who won ‘cos they had bigger swords.” ~Esmerelda “Granny” Weatherwax

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