Terry Pratchett Quotes

Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict. city', he recovered.

~ Terry Pratchett

To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.

~ Terry Pratchett

To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.

~ Terry Pratchett

Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.

~ Terry Pratchett

And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.

~ Terry Pratchett

The Tezuman Empire in the jungle valleys of central Klatch is known for it organic market gardens, its exquisite craftsmanship in obsidian, feathers and jade, and its mass human sacrifices in honor of Quezovercoatl, the Feathered Boa, god of mass human sacrifices.

~ Terry Pratchett

But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.

~ Terry Pratchett

Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum! or Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!

~ Terry Pratchett

If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

~ Terry Pratchett

As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.

~ Terry Pratchett

...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.

~ Terry Pratchett

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

~ Terry Pratchett

She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.

~ Terry Pratchett

She was not an unkind woman, despite a lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education, but she was conscientious and a stickler for propriety and thought she knew how this sort of thing should go and was vaguely annoyed that it wasn't going.

~ Terry Pratchett

But she’s going to have a lot of problems.THAT’S WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT. SO I’M TOLD. I WOULDN’T KNOW, OF COURSE.What about reincarnation?Death hesitated.YOU WOULDN’T LIKE IT, he said. TAKE IT FROM ME.I’ve heard that some people do it all the time.YOU’VE GOT TO BE TRAINED TO IT. YOU’VE GOT TO START OFF SMALL AND WORK UP. YOU’VE NO IDEA HOW HORRIBLE IT IS TO BE AN ANT.It’s bad?YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT. AND WITH YOUR KARMA AN ANT IS TOO MUCH TO EXPECT.

~ Terry Pratchett

I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun. -I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.

~ Terry Pratchett

There is always time for another last minute

~ Terry Pratchett

Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.

~ Terry Pratchett

The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

~ Terry Pratchett

I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.

~ Terry Pratchett

Life could be horrible in the wrong trouser of time.

~ Terry Pratchett

The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord. Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.

~ Terry Pratchett

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

~ Terry Pratchett

You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.

~ Terry Pratchett

Well, child? Aren't you going to try to turn me into some kind of unspeakable creature?I don't think I shall bother, madam, seeing as you are making such a good job of it yourself!

~ Terry Pratchett

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.

~ Terry Pratchett

If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged

~ Terry Pratchett

Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.

~ Terry Pratchett

She wore so much thick white makeup in order to conceal her naturally rosy complexion that if she turned around suddenly her face would probably end up on the back of her head.

~ Terry Pratchett

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

~ Terry Pratchett

Just to keep the bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death.

~ Terry Pratchett

Cheese runners shouted at it, tried to grab it, and flailed at it with sticks, but the piratical cheese scythed onward, reaching the bottom just ahead of the terrible carnage of men and cheeses as they piled up. Then it rolled back to the top and sat there demurely while still gently vibrating.At the bottom of the slope, fights were breaking out among the cheese jockeys who were still capable of punching somebody, and since everybody was watching that, Tiffany took the opportunity to snatch up Horace and shove him in her bag. After all, he was hers. Well, that was to say she had made him, although something odd must have gone into the mix since Horace was the only cheese that would eat mice and, if you didn't nail him down, other cheeses as well.

~ Terry Pratchett

Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

~ Terry Pratchett

I never said nothing...I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You've got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn't dead!

~ Terry Pratchett

But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.

~ Terry Pratchett

But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

~ Terry Pratchett

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

~ Terry Pratchett

Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!

~ Terry Pratchett

(About sweeping)....What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.

~ Terry Pratchett

. . . you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry King was all about business.

~ Terry Pratchett