Quotes from Terry Pratchett

And these are your reasons, my lord? Do you think I have others? said Lord Vetinari. My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent. Hughnon reflected that 'entirely transparent' meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn't see them at all.

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

They always gives me bath salts, complained Nobby. And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can't think why, 'cos it's not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You'd think they'd take the hint, wouldn't you?

Don't you understand? snarled Rincewind. We are going over the Edge, godsdammit! Can't we do anything about it? No! Then I can't see the sense in panicking, said Twoflower calmly.

At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.

They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt.

Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.

He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine...

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

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.

I've seen excitement, and I've seen boredom. And boredom was best.

All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed.

Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!

Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all is truth beauty and is beauty truth, and does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if there's no one there to hear it, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.

I'm a witch. It's what we do. When it's nobody else's business, it's my business.

Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available.

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.

No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles].

Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.

Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.