Quotes from Terry Pratchett

There had been a time when the continents were different, Rincewind understood, and then they'd sort of shuffled more comfortably together like puppies on a basket.

It was usually a case of heir today, gone tomorrow.

He hated weapons, and not just because they'd so often been aimed at him. You got into more trouble if you had a weapon. People shot you instantly if they thought you were going to shoot them. But if you were unarmed, they often stopped to talk. Admittedly, they tended to say things like, You'll never guess what we're going to do to you, pal, but that took time. And Rincewind could do a lot with a few more seconds. He could use them to live longer in.

Magrat woke up. And knew she wasn't a witch anymore. The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00.

Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference.

Tiffany's father didn't cry but gave her a silver dollar and rather gruffly told her to be sure to write home every week, which is a man's way of crying.

Human beings have always preferred common sense to logic.

And visitors say: how does such a big city exist? What keeps it going? Since it's got a river you can chew, where does the drinking water come from? What is, in fact, the basis of its civic economy? How come it, against all probability, works ? Actually, visitors don't often say this. They usually say things like, Which way to the, you know, the...er...you know, the young ladies, right?

No!" Moist's fist thumped the table. "Never say that, Tolliver! Never! Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl! Keep moving forward!

Books've got to have a name on 'em so's everyone knows who's guilty.

there's times when you look at the universe and you think 'What about me?' and you can just hear the universe replying, 'Well, what about you?

Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.

a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something was broken.

A camel in distress isn't a shy creature. It doesn't hang around in bars, nursing a solitary drink. It doesn't phone up old friends and sob at them. It doesn't mope, or write long soulful poems about Life and how dreadful it is when seen from a bedsitter. It doesn't know what angst is.

Everyday took an age to go by, which was odd, because days plural went past like a stampede.

Granny Weatherwax was stretched rigid on her bed. Her face was gray, her skin was cold. People had discovered her like this before, and it always caused embarrassment. So now she reassured visitors but tempted fate by always holding, in her rigid hands, a small handwritten sign which read: I ATE'NT DEAD.

You didn't have to know Pilu for long to see that he floated through life like a coconut on the ocean. He always bobbed up. There was some sort of natural spring of cheerfulness that bubbled to the surface. Sadness was like a cloud across the sun, soon past. Sorrow was tucked away somewhere in his head, locked up in a cage with a blanket over it, like the captain's parrot.

Men come and go, but dust accumulates.

Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits.

The point I'm making," said Yo-Less, "is that you've got to help your friends, right?" He turned to Johnny. "Now, personally, I think you're very nearly totally disturbed and suffering from psychosomatica and hearing voices and seeing delusions," he said "and probably ought to be locked up in one of those white jackets with the stylish long sleeves. But that doesn't matter, 'cause we're friends.

It's a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn't blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn't shot. If it hadn't been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumour would never have got started.

How do you know he's dead? I realize that I may regret asking that question." "He's got a broken neck from falling off a roof and I reckon he fell off because he got a steel crossbow dart in his brain." "Ah. That sounds like dead, if you want my medical opinion.

You fight a war to change the world, and it changes into a world with no place in it for you, the fighter. Those who fight for the bright future are not always, by nature, well fitted to live in it.

Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.