“So much universe, and so little time.”
— Terry Pratchett
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
“If you trust in yourself... and believe in your dreams... and follow your star... you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.”
“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”
“When in doubt, choose to live.”
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
“And what would humans be without love? RARE, said Death.”
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”
“Given enough coffee I could rule the world.”
“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
“Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.”
“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”
“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.”
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
“Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your responsibility.”
“Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”
“There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.”
“A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.”
“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?”
“Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.”
“It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.”
“Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder.”
“Death: Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.”
“Things just happen. What the hell.”
“Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to being good.”
“Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.”
“Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.”
“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
“The harder I work, the luckier I become.”
“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
“Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.”
“Everything is a test.”
“Of course I’m sane, when trees start talking to me, I don’t talk back.”
“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”
“This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.”
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”
“Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed any more.”
“She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.”
“Everyone should occasionally break the law in some small and delightful way. It’s good for the hygiene of the brain.”
“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”
“People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.”
“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.”
“The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.”
“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.”
“The best research is the research that you don’t know that you are doing.”
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
“Insanity is catching.”
“Steal five dollars and you’re a common thief. Steal thousands and you’re either the government or a hero.”
“It doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.”
“History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.”
“Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!”
“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”
“There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.”
“Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.”
“The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.”
“I don’t think I’ve drunk enough beer to understand that.”
“Grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue.”
“It’s vital to remember who you really are. It’s very important. It isn’t a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.”
“Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.”
“Despite rumor, Death isn’t cruel – merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”
“SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it’s wrong.”
“Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It’s the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.”
“When you look into the abyss, it’s not supposed to wave back.”
“I imagine that fish have no word for water.”
“When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend.”
“Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.”
“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.”
“Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn’t realized that it could make you stupid.”
“Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.”
“The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.”
“You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.”
“Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad.”
“What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.”
“Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be.”
“But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.”
“Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.”
“Everywhere’s been where it is ever since it was first put there. It’s called geography.”
“All property is theft, except mine.”
“The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.”
“Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy that eluded him at the moment.”
“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”
“We are monkeys. We like to chatter. Chattering doesn’t cost us anything.”
“The sun set, which is everyday magic...”
“And Sam Vimes thought: Why is Young Sam’s nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in the city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!”
“It wasn’t that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.”
“If I were you, I’d sue my face for slander.”
“And the new day was a great big fish.”
“It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as “slightly foxed”, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well. – Ah, but has it been hedgehogged?”
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