Terry Pratchett Quotes

Death: Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.

It was one of those problematic occasions with long silences, sporadic coughs, and people saying isolated things like, "Well, isn't this nice.

I thought it very strange, and very sad, that the fairy kingdom largely appears to be English. I thought it was time for some regional representation. And the Nac Mac Feegle are, well, they're like tiny little Scottish Smurfs who have seen Braveheart altogether too many times.

Oh, there's plenty of reasons. I just don't know which one.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.

Few things are hidden from a quiet child with good eyesight.

Nature abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills.

You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.

You're allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again.

What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

I taught myself more in the library than school taught me.

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

...no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

What did they feed the lions and tigers with in the ark, sir?

The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Divide by cucumber error. Please reinstall universe and reboot.

If you have let pride get the better of you, then you have already lost, but if you grab pride by the scruff of the neck and ride it like a stallion, then you may have already won.

The diplomatic thing for me to say is that if publishers are dressing up other authors as Terry Pratchett clones then they are doing a disservice to those authors. If they didn't dress them as clones but did something different, then those authors could be pioneering in a different sense.

Matter exploded into being, apparently as chaos, but in fact as a chord. The ultimate power chord.

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.

It's hard to be famous and alive.

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

There was this about vampires : they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were... what was the word... deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.

Bill Door was impressed. Miss Flitworth could actually give the word "revenue", which had two vowels and one diphthong, all the peremptoriness of the word "scum.

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.

Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out.

Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.

In Genua, someone set out to make dreams come true. Remember some of your dreams?

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

The labyrinth of Ephebe is ancient and full of one hundred and one amazing things you can do with hidden springs, razor-sharp knives, and falling rocks.

That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.

Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian. With a badge.

I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people.

You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.

There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... then there's a race - between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up. Sometimes, you can make your own space.

I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him.

Fresh wounds," said Angua. "But one of them did shoot one of the other in the leg by accident." "I think you'd better put in your report as -self inflicted- wounds while resisting arrest," said Vimes.

Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.

Of course, just because we've heard a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong.

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.

They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever.