Terry Pratchett Quotes

The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.

Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals

He felt as if he had been shipwrecked on the Titanic, but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania

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.

The universe was bad enough without people poking it.

After all, when you seek advice from someone it's certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.

They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it while it remains unmoved. You had to be the centre of the seesaw so the pain flowed through you, not into you. It was very hard. But she could do it!

Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling 'banana', but didn't know how you stopped.

There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly. He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?

Stand before your god, bow before your king, kneel before your man.

One of the things forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

And the new day was a great big fish.

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.

That was always the dream, wasn't it? 'I wish I'd known 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.

All property is theft, except mine.

Here's what I suggest," he said. "You pretend that rats can think, and I'll promise to pretend that humans can think, too.

Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it." "No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.

I never said nothing..." "I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You've got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn't dead!

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got to the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

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.

The reaper does not listen to the harvest.

Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't.

Never cross a woman with a star on a stick, young lady. They've got a mean streak.

Don't you *ever* let go?" "I haven't yet." "Why?" "I suppose... because in this world, after everyone panics, there's always got to be someone to tip the wee out of the shoe.

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.

Anyway, just because you're sworn enemies doesn't mean you can't be friends, does it?

When she spoke again it was in the thin, careful and above all brave voice of someone who has pulled themselves together despite overwhelming odds but might let go again at any moment.

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

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!

Knowing things is magical, if other people don't know them.

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 colors are chosen, institutional decor 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 colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things because. wow, then I could afford much *better* childish things!

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.

The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.

People don't like to say Horror so they say Dark Fantasy because that's Horror wearing a collar and tie.

I can't stand any music that requires its singers to be so dumb they wear their baseball caps backwards.

Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.

Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron. "Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late.