Quotes from Terry Pratchett

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.

Young women should not go alone on dark nights, even in Oxfordshire. But any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt.

Rincewind tried shutting his eyes, but there were no eyelids to his imagination and it was staring widely

Well, I wish I'd get out of my head, it's quite crowded enough with me in here.

I nearly committed a terrible sin, said Brutha. I nearly ate fruit on a fruitless day. That's a terrible thing, a terrible thing, said Om. Now cut the melon.

the awesome splendor of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.

Hrun the Barbarian, who was practilly an academic by Hub standards in that he could think without moving his lips.

But she was too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female profession generally available.

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

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.

You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines... or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are.

You can think and you can fight, but the world's always movin', and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance.

The Four Horsemen whose Ride presages the end of the world are known to be Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But even less significant events have their own Horsemen. For example, the Four Horsemen of the Common Cold are Sniffles, Chesty, Nostril, and Lack of Tissues; the Four Horsemen whose appearance foreshadows any public holiday are Storm, Gales, Sleet, and Contra-flow.

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.

Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.

The grags came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing.

You are very clever, said the old man shyly. I would like to eat your brains, one day.

Where do you think they've gone?' he said. 'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted. 'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.' 'Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.' 'But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?' Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile. 'Most people seem to manage,' she said. She reached across the table and touched his hand.

In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself, said Detritus, awe and wonder in his voice. Truly, this a land of opportunity.

Joshua, cynicism is the only reasonable response to the antics of humanity.

Sometimes you had to take a look at yourself and then look away.

The Universe is a lot more complicated than it looks from the outside.

There were only three times in your life when it was proper to come through the front door, and you were carried every time.