Quotes from Terry Pratchett

The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches, they gave you a bigger shovel.

But you ain't part of it, are you? said Granny conversationally. You try, but you always find yourself watchin' yourself watchin' people, eh? Never quite believin' anything? Thinkin' the wrong thoughts?

These weren't encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a longbow's arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred yards away instead of the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.

Raise the stakes! Always push your luck because no one else would push it for you.

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.

Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.

Cake is not the issue here.

She couldn't do any worse, but then, he couldn't do better. So maybe it balanced out.

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.

You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.

You couldn't say: It's not my fault. You couldn't say: It's not my responsibility. You could say: I will deal with this. You didn't have to want to. But you had to do it.

Is It Frightening To Be Free? You said it. You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves? Seems to be a major human activity, yes.

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn't divide easily into 'true' and 'false', but instead could be 'things that people needed to know at the moment' and 'things that they didn't need to know at the moment'.

And it came to pass that in that time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: 'Psst!'

Well, I suppose there's no place like home," she said. "No," said Granny Weatherwax, still looking thoughtful. "No. There's a billion places like home. But only one of 'em's where you live.

Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

It pays to advertise," Nanny agreed. "This is Greebo. Between you and me, he's a fiend from hell." "Well, he's a cat," said Mrs. Gogol, generously. "It's only to be expected.

Hell needed horribly bright, self-centered people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage

The fastest way to travel is to be there already.

There was something about the eyes. It wasn't the shape or the color. The was no evil glint. But there was… … a look. It was such a look that a microbe might encounter if it could see up from the bottom end of the microscope. It said: You are nothing. It said: You are flawed, you have no value. It said: You are animal. It said: Perhaps you may be a pet, or perhaps you may be a quarry. It said: And the choice is not yours.

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.

When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions.

A 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.