Quotes from Terry Pratchett

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork sat back on his austere chair with the sudden bright smile of a very busy person at the end of a crowded day who's suddenly found in his schedule a reminder saying: 7.00-7.05, Be Cheerful and Relaxed and a People Person.

Human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium...

Anything could make Wentworth sticky. Washed and dried and left in the middle of a clean floor for five minutes, Wentworth would be sticky. It didn't seem to come from anywhere. He just got sticky.

Some people are confident because they are fools. Leonard had the look of someone who was confident because, so far, he'd never found reason not to be. He would step off a high building in the happy state of mind of someone who intended to deal with the problem of the ground when it presented itself.

What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?

Don't be ridiculous, man, said Ridcully, there's no such thing as dwarf smuggling. Yeah? Then what's that you've got there? I'm a giant, said Casanunda. Giants are a lot bigger. I've been ill.

This is Masher,' said Feeney. 'His father was a wild boar, his mother was surprised.

Humans are always slightly lost. It's a basic characteristic.

The light was misty and actinic, the sort of light to make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer.

We got the spell exactly right. Except for the ingredients. And most of the poetry. And it probably wasn't the right time. And Gytha took most of it home for the cat, which couldn't of been proper.

While evidence says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they're probably all on first steps.

Greebo turned upon Granny Weatherwax a yellow-eyed stare of self-satisfied malevolence, such as cats always reserve for people who don't like them, and purred. Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.

Your power is only rumour and lies, she thought. You bore your way into people when they are uncertain and weak and worried and frightened, and they think their enemy is other people when their enemy is, and always will be, you – the master of lies. Outside, you are fearsome; inside, you are nothing but weakness.

Oh, no, said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. Not that. That's meddling with things you don't understand. Well, we are wizards, said Ridcully. We're supposed to meddle in things we don't understand. If we hung around waitin' till we understood things we'd never get anything done.

The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

If the abnormal goes on long enough it becomes the normal.

Do unto others before they do unto you.

Man just went past with a cat on his head

An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact," said Granny. "But I don't hold with encouraging it.

The point is not to avoid the war, it is to win it.

The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.

Genuine anger was one of the world's great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

Too many books in one place, who knew what they could do? Miss Tick told her one day: 'Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter is mass, and mass changes time and space.