Quotes from Terry Pratchett

The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

Every organization needs at least one person who knows what's going on, and why it's happening, and who's doing it.

ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

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

Drinks like this tend to get called Traffic Lights or Rainbow's Revenge or, in places where truth is more highly valued, Hello and Good-Bye, Mr. Brain Cell.

But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

I thought the rule was that all monks were shaved.' 'Oh, Soto says he is bald under the hair,'said Lu Tze. 'He says the hair is a separate creature that just happens to live on him.

I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting Forward, brave comrades! you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!

Now look , snapped the Dean, we've searched everywhere for a decent library on this island. There simply isn't one! It's ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to get anything done?

And yet we say this. Here is the cave at the end of the world, peace is made between dwarf and troll, and we will march beyond the hand of Death together. For the enemy is not Troll, nor is it Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good...

So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.

Moist waited. Lord Vetinari could outstare a statue and make even a statue start to feel nervous and confess. Moist's counter was a fetching grin, which he knew annoyed Vetinari beyond measure, and there was absolute silence in the Oblong Office while blank stare and cheery grin battled it out for supremacy in some other dimension.

I have certainly noticed that groups of clever and intelligent people are capable of really stupid ideas.

And then there was the headless horseman! said Tiffany. He had no head! Well, that is the major job qualification, said the toad.

They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.

Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon -- he'd run them all.

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.

Fate can be one mean god at times.

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.

All things are defined by names. Change the name, and you change the thing.

I'm not a natural killer ! See this? See what it says? I'm supposed to keep the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual!

We cannae just rush in, ye ken. Point o' order, Big Man. Ye can just rush in. We always just rush in. Aye, Big Yan, point well made. But ye gotta know where ye're just gonna rush in. Ye cannae just rush in anywhere . It looks bad, havin' to rush oout again straight awa'.

Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words.