Quotes from Terry Pratchett

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he'd wanted things to stay the same, as well.

And that's what I don't like about magic, Captain. 'cos it's *magic*. You can't ask questions, it's magic. It doesn't explain anything, it's magic. You don't know where it comes from, it's magic! That's what I don't like about magic, it does everything by magic!

Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.

THERE IS NO JUSTICE said Death JUST ME

You can't trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.

When he was a boy he'd read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines. Perhaps they just weren't very good at them.

You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad witch. It never worked for long. All you could try to be was a witch, as hard as you could.

Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything…

It's a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying "Wow," a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?

You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.

The storm walked around the hills on legs of lightning, shouting and grumbling.

Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.

That's how we survive infinity - we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor, I don't know who is.

Are we entirely ready, sir? said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means We are not entirely ready, sir. We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science.

I've never really liked the Yanks. ... You can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football.

Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.

The disc's greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents. However, the gods took pity on them and turned him into an ironing board** and her into a small brass bollard. **When you're a god, you don't have to have reasons.

When much is taken, something is returned.

It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

I believe the term is 'eminent domain.' Ah, yes. That means 'theft by the government