Terry Pratchett Quotes - Page 3

Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.
Terry Pratchett
A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.
Terry Pratchett
Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
Terry Pratchett
Hello, inner child, I'm the inner babysitter!
Terry Pratchett
Ridcully sighed.'All right, you fellows,' he said. 'No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?'The other senior wizards stared at him.'I, I, I don't think we can play it any more,' said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, 'I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces...
Terry Pratchett
The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.
Terry Pratchett
This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.
Terry Pratchett
Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?
Terry Pratchett
Insanity is catching.
Terry Pratchett
Gytha Ogg, you wouldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t jump to conclusions, right?” Nanny nodded. “Oh, yes.” There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.
Terry Pratchett
Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
Terry Pratchett
The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
Terry Pratchett
All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.
Terry Pratchett
It wasn't that dwarfs weren't interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work.
Terry Pratchett
You're free to wear whatever you want, you know
Terry Pratchett
It's like chess, you know. The Queen saves the King.
Terry Pratchett
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
Terry Pratchett
There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.
Terry Pratchett
...You want a special truth. *You* want the truth to be a truth that *you* like. You want it to be a pretty little truth that fits what you already believe!
Terry Pratchett
Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand.
Terry Pratchett
I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can’t trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don’t believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be power-crazed idiots. And I certainly don’t believe in the wisdom of wizards. I’ve worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I’m talking about.
Terry Pratchett
You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.
Terry Pratchett
Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?” said Dibbler.“He says he can’t,” said Victor.Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. “Well,” he said, “I suppose he should know.
Terry Pratchett
William groaned. It was Vimes. Worse, he was smiling, in a humourless predatory way."Ah, Mr de Worde," he said, stepping inside. "There are several thousand dogs stampeding through the city at the moment. This is an interesting fact, isn't it?"He leaned against the wall and produced a cigar. "Well, I say dogs," he said, striking a match on Goodmountain's helmet. "Mostly dogs, perhaps I should say. Some cats. More cats now, in fact, 'cos, hah, there's nothing like a, yes, a tidal wave of dogs, fighting and biting and howling, to sort of, how can I put it, give a city a certain . . . busyness. Especially underfoot,because - did I mention it? -they're very nervous dogs too. Oh, and did I mention cattle?" he went on, conversationally. "You know how it is, market day and so on, people are driving the cows and, my goodness, around the corner comes a wall of wailing dogs . . . Oh, and I forgot about the sheep. And the chickens, although I imagine there's not much left of the chickens now.
Terry Pratchett
Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.
Terry Pratchett
He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spent 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 everyday.
Terry Pratchett
Questions don't have to make sense, Vincent," said Miss Susan. "But answers do.
Terry Pratchett
Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice -- i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the world for it.
Terry Pratchett
Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.
Terry Pratchett
She’d struck Esk once before – the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life.
Terry Pratchett
You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?
Terry Pratchett
I hope you're not proposing to enslave us,' said Twoflower.Marchesa looked genuinely shocked. 'Certainly not! Whatever could have given you that idea? Your lives in Krull will be rich, full and comfortable-''Oh, good,' said Rincewind.'-just not very long.
Terry Pratchett
Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.
Terry Pratchett
There are some laws that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space.
Terry Pratchett
Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.
Terry Pratchett
Granny looked up at the zombie. He was - or, technically, had been - a tall, handsome man. He still was, only now he looked like someone who had walked through a room full of cobwebs.'What's your name, dead man?' she said.
Terry Pratchett
They are tragic,' said Vetinari, 'and we laugh at their tragedy as we laugh at our own. The painted grin leers out at us from the darkness, mocking our insane belief in order, logic, status, the reality of reality. The mask knows that we are born on the banana skin that leads only to the open manhole cover of doom, and all we can hope for are the cheers of the crowd.
Terry Pratchett
Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!
Terry Pratchett
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.
Terry Pratchett
Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.
Terry Pratchett
Who shall I shoot? You choose. Now, listen very carefully: where's your coffee? You've got coffee, haven't you? C'mon, everyone's got coffee! Spill the beans!
Terry Pratchett
But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.
Terry Pratchett
There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.
Terry Pratchett
To Tiffany's surprise, Nanny Ogg was weeping gently. Nanny took another swig from her flagon and wiped her eyes. 'Cryin' helps sometimes,' she said. 'No shame in tears for them as you've loved. Sometimes I remember one of my husbands and shed a tear or two. The memories're there to be treasured, and it's no good to get morbid-like about it.
Terry Pratchett
Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.
Terry Pratchett
Cats do not hunt seals. They would hunt them if they knew what seals and where to find them. But they do not know, so it's okay.
Terry Pratchett
Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls
Terry Pratchett
The purr is very important. It's the purr that does it every time. It's the purr that makes up for the Things Under the Bed, the occasional pungency, the 4 a.m. yowl. Other creatures went in for big teeth, long legs or over-active brains, while cats just settled for a noise that tells the world they're feeling happy.
Terry Pratchett
Er, excuse me,' said the man as Nanny Ogg turned away, 'but what is that on your shoulders?''It's. . . a fur collar,' said Nanny.'Excuse me, but I just saw it flick its tail.''Yes. I happen to believe in beauty without cruelty.
Terry Pratchett
Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls.
Terry Pratchett
Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. Men made dogs, they took wolves and gave them human things--unnecessary intelligence, names, a desire to belong, and a twitching inferiority complex. All dogs dream wolf dreams, and know they're dreaming of biting their Maker. Every dog knows, deep in his heart, that he is a Bad Dog...
Terry Pratchett
Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them. And what you might need them for was to tell you, as a friend, that you were beginning to cackle.
Terry Pratchett
Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.
Terry Pratchett
Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks gravitate to gravity.
Terry Pratchett
Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them.
Terry Pratchett
Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.
Terry Pratchett
And then there were cats, thought Dog. He'd surprised the huge ginger cat from next door and had attempted to reduce it to cowering jelly by means of the usual glowing stare and deep-throated growl, which had always worked on the damned in the past. This time they had earned him a whack on the nose that had made his eyes water. Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls. He was looking forward to a further cat experiment, which he planned would consist of jumping around and yapping excitedly at it. It was a long shot, but it just might work.
Terry Pratchett
I hate cats."Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant."I SEE," he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat haters.
Terry Pratchett
In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don't really care.
Terry Pratchett
It's madness, of course', thought Moist. 'But now I've got it, too.
Terry Pratchett