Terry Pratchett Quotes

Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more then Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.

~ Terry Pratchett

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

~ Terry Pratchett

Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons in Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the gray world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn't even notice them.

~ Terry Pratchett

... it is to your credit that you recognize that if he was a monster then it was other monstrous things which made him so. The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer...

~ Terry Pratchett

You see a wile, you thwart. Am I right?

~ Terry Pratchett

What was it that Granny Weatherwax had said once? Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things. And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.

~ Terry Pratchett

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining on mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

~ Terry Pratchett

Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should.

~ Terry Pratchett

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.

~ Terry Pratchett

She had heard it said that, before you could understand anybody, you needed to walk a mile in their shoes, which did not make a whole lot of sense, because probably AFTER you had walked a mile in their shoes, you would understand that they were chasing you and accusing you of the theft of a pair of shoes--although, of course, you could probably outrun them, owing to their lack of footwear.

~ Terry Pratchett

She sniffed, and smiled a bit, but not too much because if there is one thing worse than someone who doesn't understand you it's someone who understands perfectly, before you've had a chance to have a good pout about not being understood.

~ Terry Pratchett

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions.

~ Terry Pratchett

I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.

~ Terry Pratchett

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.

~ Terry Pratchett

Tiffany has been apprenticing as a witch by visiting people in need with her mentor. After meeting with one particularly sad case, she tells her mentor, It shouldn't be like this. Her mentor replies, There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

~ Terry Pratchett

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest 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.

~ Terry Pratchett

He was red with anger, except where he was white with rage. When he spoke, his words seared through the air like so many knives, clipped as topiary, crisp as biscuits.

~ Terry Pratchett

Anger was a weapon to be honed and treasured and used only at the moment yielding most premium.

~ Terry Pratchett

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.

~ Terry Pratchett

... responsibilities are the anvil on which a man is forged.

~ Terry Pratchett

But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.

~ Terry Pratchett

The hated have no reason to love.

~ Terry Pratchett

There were a lot of things he could say. Son of a bitch! would have been a good one. Or he could say, Welcome to civilization! He could have said, Laugh this one off! He might have said, Fetch! But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.

~ Terry Pratchett

But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.

~ Terry Pratchett

There was a wicked ole witch once called Black Aliss. She was an unholy terror. There's never been one worse or more powerful. Until now. Because I could spit in her eye and steal her teeth, see. Because she didn't know Right from Wrong, so she got all twisted up, and that was the end of her.The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live. So.. if I was a bad witch I could make Mister Salzella's muscles turn against his bones and break them where he stood... if I was bad. I could do things inside his head, change the shape he thinks he is, and he'd be down on what had been his knees and begging to be turned into a frog... if I was bad. I could leave him with a mind like a scrambled egg, listening to colors and hearing smells...if I was bad. Oh yes. There was another sigh, deeper and more heartfelt.But I can't do none of that stuff. That wouldn't be Right.She gave a deprecating little chuckle. And if Nanny Ogg had been listening, she would have resolved as follows: that no maddened cackle from Black Aliss of infamous memory, no evil little giggle from some crazed Vampyre whose morals were worse than his spelling, no side-splitting guffaw from the most inventive torturer, was quite so unnerving as a happy little chuckle from a Granny Weatherwax about to do what's best.

~ Terry Pratchett

You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.

~ Terry Pratchett

The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

~ Terry Pratchett

Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear we might not be.

~ Terry Pratchett

I don’t know what to do,” he said. “No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.

~ Terry Pratchett

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

~ Terry Pratchett

If you took the world away and just left the elctricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made - a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast.

~ Terry Pratchett

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into ‘true’ and ‘false’, but instead could be ‘things that people needed to know at the moment’ and ‘things that they didn’t need to know at the moment’.

~ Terry Pratchett

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

~ Terry Pratchett

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.

~ Terry Pratchett

He stared at his feet. “I’m still very ignorant,” he said, “but at least I’m ignorant about really important things.

~ Terry Pratchett

Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.

~ Terry Pratchett

YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.So we can believe the big ones?YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

~ Terry Pratchett

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.

~ Terry Pratchett

Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.

~ Terry Pratchett

Have a chocolate-covered raisin,” he said.“They look like rat droppings,” said the Chair.The Dean peered at them in the gloom.“So that’s it,” he said. “The bag fell on the floor a minute ago, and I thought there seemed rather a lot.

~ Terry Pratchett