Quotes from Terry Pratchett

Gytha Ogg, you wouldn't be a witch if you couldn't jump to conclusions, right?" Nanny nodded. "Oh, yes." There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn't time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.

There's always the dwarf bread.

You always knew where you stood with Quezovercoatl. It was generally with a lot of people on top of a great stepped pyramid with someone in an elegant feathered headdress chipping an exquisite obsidian knife for your very own personal use.

Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.

YOU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THAT SEEING ME GAVE YOU QUITE A START? Yes? I GAVE YOU QUITE A STOP.

Well, I think, said Nobby, that when you rule out the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, ain't worth hanging around for on a cold night wonderin' about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink.

Witches know that people die; and if they manages to die after a long time, leavin' the world better than they went an' found it, well then, that's surely a reason to be happy. All the rest of it is just tidyin' up.

Incidentally, it's best not to argue with the nursing staff. I find the best course of action is to throw some chocolates in one direction and hurry off in the other while their attention is distracted.

The pen is mightier than the sword… if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.

Sacharissa saw a movement. Boddony had pulled his axe out from under the bench. It was a traditional dwarf axe. One side was a pickaxe, for the extraction of interesting minerals, and the other side was a war axe, because the people who owned the land with the valuable minerals in it can be so unreasonable sometimes.

In the swamp the alligators drifted like patches of bad-assed water.

Death's pale horse looked up from its oats and gave a little whinny of greeting. The horse's name was Binky. He was a real horse. Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed.

How many books are there? said Masklin. Hundreds! Thousands! Do you know what they're all about? Gurder looked at him blankly. Do you know what you're saying? he said. No. But I want to find out. They're about everything! You'd never believe it! They're full of words even I don't understand! Can you find a book which tells you how to understand words you don't understand? said Masklin. Gurder hesitated. It's an intriguing thought, he said.

That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I knew then what I know now"? But when you got older, you found out that you now wasn't you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. A much better dream, one that'd ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn't know then.

They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They weren't about to upset no pixie.

We spray our fantasies on the landscape like a dog sprays urine. It turns it into ours. Once we've invented our gods and demons, we can propitiate or exorcize them. Once we've put fairies in the sinister solitary thorn tree, we can decide where we stand in relation to it; we can hang ribbons on it, see visions under it—or bulldoze it up and call ourselves free of superstition.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

Tomorrow here is just like yesterday, warmed over.

Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.

The Librarian liked being best man. You were allowed to kiss bridesmaids, and they weren't allowed to run away.

But a girl starting out in life might well say to herself: 'Is this it? You worked hard and denied yourself things and what you got at the end was hard work and self-denial?

And now the birds were singing overhead, and there was a soft rustling in the undergrowth, and all the sounds of the forest that showed that life was still being lived blended with the souls of the dead in a woodland requiem. The whole forest now sang for Granny Weatherwax.

I've been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back.

He was trying to conjure up a succubus. It should be impossible to leer when all you've got is a beak, but the parrot managed it. That's a female demon what comes in the night and makes mad passionate wossn- I've heard of them, said Rincewind. Bloody dangerous things. The parrot put its head on one side. It never worked. All he ever got was a neuralger. What's that? It's a demon that comes and has a headache at you.