Quotes from Terry Pratchett

Lawn looked down at his patient. In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.

What will you do?" said Susan. "Lie," said Lu-Tze happily. "It's amazing how often that works.

they wore their hair long like a poet who hopes that romantically flowing locks will make up for a wretched inability to find a rhyme for "daffodil.

I THINK PERHAPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. PEOPLE'S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED "LIVING." WOULD YOU LIKE A PRAWN?

the queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation

They sometimes forgot what happened if you let a pawn get all the way up the board.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business...

she was definitely feeling several twinkles short of a glitter...

And his head is on fire with new things[...]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever.

When you break rules, break 'em good and hard

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired - but that's not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years. The point is, there's always something before. It's always a case of Now Read On.

That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

On the Kite, the situation was being 'workshopped'. This is the means by which people who don't know anything get together to pool their ignorance.

New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world.

The human mind was a deep and abiding mystery and the Librarian was glad he didn't have one anymore.

A horse's skull always looks scary, even if someone has put lipstick on it.

She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book. It didn't.

An' writin' even goes on sayin' a man's wurds after he's deid ! Ye cannae tell me that's right!

G-d does not play games with His loyal servants, said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice. Whooo-eee, said Crowley. Where have you been?

Are you a hero, actually?" "Um, no. Not as such. Not at all, really. Even less than that, in fact.

He's a bit set in his ways. Congealed, I should think.

If you want something done, give it to someone who's busy!