The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
Terry PratchettI think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.
Terry PratchettEvolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Terry PratchettA lot hinges on the fact that, in most circumstances, people are not allowed to hit you with a mallet. They put up all kinds of visible and invisible signs that say, 'Do not do this' in the hope that it'll work, but if it doesn't, then they shrug, because there is, really, no real mallet at all.
Terry PratchettI've never really liked the Yanks. ... You can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football.
Terry PratchettMost people who have found that they are more intelligent than most around them, have yet to learn that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out.
Terry PratchettYour average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.
Terry PratchettThere is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.
Terry PratchettIt's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave... you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.
Terry PratchettBut there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.
Terry PratchettHowever, you do need rules. Driving on the left (or the right or, in parts of Europe, on the left and the right as the mood takes you) is a rule which works, since following it means you're more likely to reach your intended rather than your final destination.
Terry PratchettDown there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.
Terry PratchettFor an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.
Terry PratchettShe walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.
Terry PratchettThe sign, which says: "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door!" - Of course, I've read it. Why do you think I want it opened?.. To see why they wanted it shut, of course. This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.
Terry PratchettHistorical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.
Terry PratchettAdventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.
Terry PratchettI think it's IMPOSSIBLE for anyone famous to come from here, because everyone around here is insane.
Terry PratchettNow he knew: They were real. Who’d make up a thing like this? Okay, one of them was a cheese that rolled around of its own accord, but nobody was perfect.
Terry PratchettI would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds, if I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.
Terry PratchettPonder just let it happen. It's because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.
Terry PratchettCarpe Jugulum," read Agnes aloud. "That's... well, Carpe Diem is 'Sieze the Day,' so this means-" "Go for the throat
Terry PratchettChrist managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'
Terry PratchettNeither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
Terry PratchettClassically, very few people have considered that cleanliness is next to godliness. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of prophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap.
Terry PratchettNoble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.
Terry PratchettI don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
Terry PratchettMaurice 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 PratchettHis 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 PratchettShe got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.
Terry PratchettConsider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.
Terry PratchettHis progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.
Terry PratchettIn her own special category, she was quite beautiful. This was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at.
Terry PratchettNo one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
Terry PratchettMoney is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.
Terry Pratchett