Terry Pratchett Quotes - Page 13

It wasn't that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.
Terry Pratchett
Well, child? Aren't you going to try to turn me into some kind of unspeakable creature?I don't think I shall bother, madam, seeing as you are making such a good job of it yourself!
Terry Pratchett
People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
Terry Pratchett
You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.
Terry Pratchett
The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.
Terry Pratchett
Life could be horrible in the wrong trouser of time.
Terry Pratchett
I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
Terry Pratchett
The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.
Terry Pratchett
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
Terry Pratchett
There is always time for another last minute
Terry Pratchett
I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.
Terry Pratchett
But she’s going to have a lot of problems."THAT’S WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT. SO I’M TOLD. I WOULDN’T KNOW, OF COURSE."What about reincarnation?"Death hesitated.YOU WOULDN’T LIKE IT, he said. TAKE IT FROM ME."I’ve heard that some people do it all the time."YOU’VE GOT TO BE TRAINED TO IT. YOU’VE GOT TO START OFF SMALL AND WORK UP. YOU’VE NO IDEA HOW HORRIBLE IT IS TO BE AN ANT."It’s bad?"YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT. AND WITH YOUR KARMA AN ANT IS TOO MUCH TO EXPECT.
Terry Pratchett
She was not an unkind woman, despite a lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education, but she was conscientious and a stickler for propriety and thought she knew how this sort of thing should go and was vaguely annoyed that it wasn't going.
Terry Pratchett
She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.
Terry Pratchett
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
Terry Pratchett
...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.
Terry Pratchett
As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.
Terry Pratchett
If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.
Terry Pratchett
Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!
Terry Pratchett
But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.
Terry Pratchett
The Tezuman Empire in the jungle valleys of central Klatch is known for it organic market gardens, its exquisite craftsmanship in obsidian, feathers and jade, and its mass human sacrifices in honor of Quezovercoatl, the Feathered Boa, god of mass human sacrifices.
Terry Pratchett
She is standing just behind you. Just behind your right shoulder."In the silence of the woods, Polly turned."I can't see her," she said."I am happy for you," said Wazzer, handing her the empty mug."But I didn't see anything," said Polly."No," said Wazzer. "But you turned around...
Terry Pratchett
Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it'd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn't explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war."And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf," said Cheery sadly. "There's the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we're all dwarfs," she said, "but relations are strained.
Terry Pratchett
And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.
Terry Pratchett
To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.
Terry Pratchett
To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.
Terry Pratchett
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.
Terry Pratchett
Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict. city', he recovered.
Terry Pratchett
It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing' people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.
Terry Pratchett
Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot.
Terry Pratchett
When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.
Terry Pratchett
Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
Terry Pratchett
Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening.
Terry Pratchett
The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.
Terry Pratchett
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Terry Pratchett
You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just . . . is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.
Terry Pratchett
Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God.""That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically."Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady.""She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha."A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind,
Terry Pratchett
The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
Terry Pratchett
The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).
Terry Pratchett
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Terry Pratchett
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 space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.
Terry Pratchett
No it's not!" said Constable Visit. "Atheism is a denial of a god.""Therefore It Is A Religious Position," said Dorfl. "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.
Terry Pratchett
On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed.
Terry Pratchett
What have I always believed?That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.
Terry Pratchett
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.
Terry Pratchett
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
If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!
Terry Pratchett
That’s what being alive is, Thing! It’s being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!
Terry Pratchett
Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.
Terry Pratchett
I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.
Terry Pratchett
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
Terry Pratchett
I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
Terry Pratchett
First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.
Terry Pratchett
[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!
Terry Pratchett
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
Terry Pratchett
Maladict had hallucinations, but Wazzer had a certainty you could bend steel around. It was the opposite of a hallucination, somehow. It was as if she could see what was real and you couldn't.
Terry Pratchett
Then Carrot said, "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, captain. That's what they say.""What?" Vimes' sudden rage was like a thunderclap. "Who says that? When has that ever been true? It's never been true! It's the kind of thing people without power say to make it all seem less bloody awful, but it's just words, it never makes any difference -
Terry Pratchett
DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE.-Death
Terry Pratchett
Do you know how wizards like to be buried?""Yes!""Well, how?"Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs."Reluctantly.
Terry Pratchett
Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward?How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?
Terry Pratchett