Quotes from Terry Pratchett

It didn't look like the kind of snow that whispers down gently in the pit of the night and in the morning turns the landscape into a glittering wonderland of uncommon and ethereal beauty. It looked like the kind of snow that intends to make the world as bloody cold as possible.

Gods didn't mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief …

Truly, he thought, the way of enlightenment is like unto half a mile of broken glass.

Welcome to fear , Moist said to himself. It's hope, turned inside out.

Where's the sense in promising to achive the achievable?

Daft Wullie had raised a finger. 'Point o' order, Rob,' he said, 'but it was a wee bittie hurtful there for you to say I dinna hae the brains of a beetle...' Rob hesitated, but only for a moment. 'Aye, Daft Wullie, ye are right in whut ye say. It was unricht o' me to say that. It was the heat o' the moment, an' I am full sorry for it. As I stand here before ye now, I will say: Daft Wullie, ye DO hae the brains o' a beetle, an' I'll fight any scunner who says different!

Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown.

So I had to learn. All my life. The hard way. And the hard way's pretty hard, but not so hard as the easy way. I learned.

The only hat worth wearing was the one you made for yourself, not one you bought, not one you were given. Your own hat, for your own head. Your own future, not someone else's.

Vimes' meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet very nagging suspicion that he'd only just escaped with his life.

Well, yes, but it's not about the football. You're saying that football is not about football? It's the sharing, she said. It's being part of the crowd. It's chanting together. It's all of it. the whole thing.

The truly smart, having discovered they are cleverer than the people around them, soon learn that the smartest thing of all for them to do is to prevent said people from ever finding this out.

And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler?

Our skills, you will find, could be our jailers.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

Sometimes, Tiffany thought, I am so fed up with being young.

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn't just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

they were in every colour sweets can be, such as Not-Really-Raspberry Red, Fake-Lemon Yellow, Curiously-Chemical Orange, Some-Kind-of-Acidy Green and Who-Knows-What Blue.

Let him be whoever he thinks he is," she said. "That's all anybody could hope for in this world.

People lived, and died, and were remembered. It happened in the same way that winter follows summer. It was not a wrong thing. There were tears, of course, but they were for those who were left; those who had gone on did not need them

with the grin of one who mistakenly thinks he's a wit when he's only half a one.

Hah! said Granny Weatherwax. I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about...cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about...something else entirely, she added darkly.

Mort remembered the woodcut in his grandmother's almanack, between the page on planting times and the phases of the moon section, showing Dethe thee Great Levyller Comes To Alle Menne. He'd stared at it hundreds of times when learning his letters. It wouldn't have been half so impressive if it had been generally known that the flame-breathing horse the specter rode was called Binky.

I recall no arrangement, Mau, no bargain, covenant, agreement or promise. There is what happens, and what does not happen. There is no 'should