Quotes from Terry Pratchett

There are the people of the day, and the creatures of the night. And it's important to remember that the creatures of the night aren't simply the people of the day staying up late because they think that makes them cool and interesting. It takes more than heavy mascara and a pale complexion to cross the divide.

It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour. That would do it every time.

Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories.

If you invited a hedge wizard to a party, he would spend half the evening talking to your potted plant. And he would spend the other half listening.

The night was as black as the inside of a cat.

His mouth said: Would you like to have dinner tonight? For just the skin of a second, Miss Dearheart was surprised, but not half as surprised as Moist. Then her natural cynicism reinflated. I like to have dinner every night. With you? No. I have things to do. Thank you for asking. No problem, said Moist, slightly relieved.

Adam looked at Them. They were his kind of people, too. You just had to decide who your friends really were.

Sitting in front of a keyboard and a screen is work. Thousands of offices operate on this very principle.

What was it that Granny Weatherwax had said once? Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things. And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.

My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure, said Carrot. Really? Well, there's eleven of them.

Good evening, gentlemen!' said the vampire. 'Please pay attention. I am a reformed vampire, which is to say, I am a bundle of repressed instincts held together with spit and coffee. It would be wrong to say that violent, tearing carnage does not come easily to me. It's not tearing your throats out that doesn't come easily to me. Please don't make it any harder.

Mort was hurt by this. It was one thing not to want to marry someone, but quite another to be told they didn't want to marry you.

It was never easy being a witch. Oh, the broomstick was great, but to be a witch you needed to be sensible, so sensible that sometimes it hurt. You dealt with the reality—not what people wanted.

It was, he felt, a persistent flaw in his wife's otherwise practical and sensible character that she believed, against all evidence, that he was a man of many talents. He knew he had hidden depths. There was nothing in them that he'd like to see float to the surface. They contained things that should be left to lie.

There's some things we can't think because we don't know the words.

Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out.

Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters.

Mission motto, sir, said Carrot cheerfully. Morituri Nolumus Mori. Rincewind suggested it. I imagine he did, said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly. And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind? Er... Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape. Er... roughly speaking, it means, 'We who are about to die don't want to', sir.

IN MY EXPERIENCE, SUSAN, WITHIN THEIR HEADS TOO MANY HUMANS SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN THE MIDDLE OF WARS THAT HAPPENED CENTURIES AGO.

He's going to arrest the Patrician, Vimes told himself, the thought trickling through his brain like an icy rivulet. He's actually going to arrest the Patrician. The supreme ruler. He's going to arrest him. This is what he's actually going to do. The boy doesn't know the meaning of the word fear. Oh, wouldn't it be a good idea if he knew the meaning of the word survival...

Against one perfect moment, the centuries beat in vain.

I see embarrassment among all of you. That's good. The thing about being embarrassed is that sooner or later you aren't, but you remember that you were.

It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said "ouch," nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn't feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.

That's what being alive is, Thing! It's being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!