Terry Pratchett Quotes

Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?” said Dibbler.“He says he can’t,” said Victor.Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. “Well,” he said, “I suppose he should know.

~ Terry Pratchett

You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

~ Terry Pratchett

I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can’t trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don’t believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be power-crazed idiots. And I certainly don’t believe in the wisdom of wizards. I’ve worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I’m talking about.

~ Terry Pratchett

Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand.

~ Terry Pratchett

...You want a special truth. *You* want the truth to be a truth that *you* like. You want it to be a pretty little truth that fits what you already believe!

~ Terry Pratchett

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.

~ Terry Pratchett

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

~ Terry Pratchett

It's like chess, you know. The Queen saves the King.

~ Terry Pratchett

It wasn't that dwarfs weren't interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work.

~ Terry Pratchett

You're free to wear whatever you want, you know

~ Terry Pratchett

All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

~ Terry Pratchett

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.

~ Terry Pratchett

Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

~ 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.

~ Terry Pratchett

Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?

~ Terry Pratchett

Insanity is catching.

~ Terry Pratchett

The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.

~ Terry Pratchett

Ridcully sighed.'All right, you fellows,' he said. 'No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?'The other senior wizards stared at him.'I, I, I don't think we can play it any more,' said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, 'I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces...

~ Terry Pratchett

Hello, inner child, I'm the inner babysitter!

~ Terry Pratchett

Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.

~ Terry Pratchett

If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.

~ Terry Pratchett

Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.

~ Terry Pratchett

A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.

~ Terry Pratchett

Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

~ Terry Pratchett

I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.

~ Terry Pratchett

And people think she killed him? said Miss Tick. She sighed. They probably think she cooked him in the oven, or somet

~ Terry Pratchett

You couldn't escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat.

~ Terry Pratchett

No,' she said. 'No, I don't reckon that's what I do now. Are you watchin', Mrs Gogol? Are you watchin' real close?' Her gaze travelled the room and rested for just a fraction of a second on Magrat. Then she reached over, carefully, and thrust her arm up to the elbow into the burning torch. And the doll in Erzulie Gogol's hands burst into flame. It went on blazing even after the witch had screamed and dropped it on to the floor. It went on burning until Nanny Ogg ambled over with a jug of fruit juice from the buffet, whistling between her teeth, and put it out. Granny withdrew her hand. It was unscathed.

~ Terry Pratchett

For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.

~ Terry Pratchett

The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.

~ Terry Pratchett

Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings.

~ Terry Pratchett

I'm not a lady, I'm a witch.

~ Terry Pratchett

We ain’t going to curse anyone,” said Granny firmly. “It hardly ever works if they don’t know you’ve done it.

~ Terry Pratchett

We got the spell exactly right. Except for the ingredients. And most of the poetry. And it probably wasn’t the right time. And Gytha took most of it home for the cat, which couldn’t of been proper.

~ Terry Pratchett

Witches just aren’t like that,” said Magrat. “We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration. She blushed, although not greenly, and looked at her knees.“Goodie Whemper did a recipe,” she confessed. “It’s quite easy. What you do is, you get some lead, and you—”“I don’t think that would be appropriate,” said Granny carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. “It could give people the wrong idea.”“But not for long,” said Nanny wistfully.

~ Terry Pratchett

At last the magic caught, and she managed to vault clumsily onto it before it trundled into the night sky as gracefully as a duck with one wing missing.

~ Terry Pratchett

Gossiping's part of witchcraft,' said Tiffany. 'They're checking to see if they've gone batty yet.

~ Terry Pratchett

It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said “ouch,” nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn’t feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.

~ Terry Pratchett

Tiffany jumped when she saw a balloon sail up above the trees, catch the wind, and swoop away, but it turned out to be just a balloon and not a lump of excess Brian. She could tell this because it was followed by a long scream of rage mixed with a roar of complaint: “AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!” which is the traditional sound of a very small child learning that with balloons, as with life itself, it is important to know when not to let go of the string. The whole point of balloons is to teach small children this.

~ Terry Pratchett

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?

~ Terry Pratchett