Terry Pratchett Quotes

Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.

~ Terry Pratchett

Don't look back! Why not? Because I just did! Run faster!

~ Terry Pratchett

We're on a mission from Glod.

~ Terry Pratchett

Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.

~ Terry Pratchett

Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir.

~ Terry Pratchett

The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

~ Terry Pratchett

Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.

~ Terry Pratchett

The Captain of the Watch says if you're still in the City by sunrise he will personally have you buried alive.

~ Terry Pratchett

You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?

~ Terry Pratchett

Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out.

~ Terry Pratchett

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

~ Terry Pratchett

Igor?' said Moist. 'You have an Igor?'Oh, yes,' said Hubert. 'That's how I get this wonderful light. They know the secret of storing lightning in jars! But don't let that worry you, Mr Lipspick. Just because I'm employing an Igor and working in a cellar doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman, ha ha ha!'Ha ha,' agreed Moist.Ha hah hah!,' said Hubert. 'Hahahahahaha!! Ahahahahahahhhhh!!!!!-'Bent slapped him on the back. Hubert coughed.Sorry about that, it's the air down here,' he mumbled.

~ Terry Pratchett

It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.

~ Terry Pratchett

Red sky at night, the city's alight.

~ Terry Pratchett

I know it’s not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig!My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow…Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!

~ Terry Pratchett

Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper's curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable*.* Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no.

~ Terry Pratchett

The dwarfs can turn lead into gold...It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.-Can we?-Damned if I know. I can't.-Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could.-Can you?-No!-Ah-ha!

~ Terry Pratchett

He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba.

~ Terry Pratchett

Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death.

~ Terry Pratchett

If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.

~ Terry Pratchett

He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.

~ Terry Pratchett

Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.It was its tendency to bend at the knees.

~ Terry Pratchett

It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

~ Terry Pratchett

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.

~ Terry Pratchett

Tiffany knew what the problem was immediately. She'd seen it before, atbirthday parties. Her brother was suffering from tragic sweetdeprivation. Yes, he was surrounded by sweets. But the moment he took anysweet at all, said his sugar-addled brain, that meant he was not takingall the rest. And there were so many sweets he'd never be able to eatthem all. It was too much to cope with. The only solution was to burstinto tears.

~ Terry Pratchett

One cannot help feeling that some alternative occupation—lettuce farming, say—would offer somewhat less of a risk of being put to death by installments. Why do you persist in it?”Goldeneyes Dactylos shrugged.“I’m good at it,” he said.

~ Terry Pratchett

Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of W'ung.He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.Then there was a question about music . . .Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn't seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like 'compost' or 'bucket' or 'wheelbarrow'. But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: 'Got your own shovel, have you?

~ Terry Pratchett

where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

~ Terry Pratchett

But I see you're not standing in a bleedin' shadow, Perks, nor have you done anything to change your bleedin' shape, you're silhouetted against the bleedin' light and your sabre's shining like a diamond in a chimney-sweep's bleedin' ear'ole! Explain!It's because of the one C, sarge! said Polly, still staring straight ahead. And that is? Colour, sarge! I'm wearing bleedin' red and white in a bleedin' grey forest, sarge!

~ Terry Pratchett

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

~ Terry Pratchett

. . . Mrs. Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts. . .

~ Terry Pratchett

Most people, on waking up, accelerate through a quick panicky pre-consciousness check-up: who am I, where am I, who is he/she, good god, why am I cuddling a policeman's helmet, what happened last night?And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time -there's that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.

~ Terry Pratchett

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.

~ Terry Pratchett

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

~ Terry Pratchett

I saved a man's life once,' said Granny. 'Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.'She patted Esk's hand as nicely as possible. 'You're a bit young for this,' she said, 'but as you grow older you'll find most people don't set foot outside their own heads much.

~ Terry Pratchett

Is somethin' wrong? said Daft Wullie.Aye! snapped the kelda. Rob willnae tak' a drink o' Special Sheep Liniment!Wullie's little face screwed up in instant grief.Ach, the Big Man's deid! he sobbed. Oh waily waily waily - Will ye hush yer gob, ye big mudlin! shouted Rob Anybody, standing up. I am no' deid! I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man cannae feel the chilly winds o' Fate lashing aroound his nethers wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?

~ Terry Pratchett

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

~ Terry Pratchett

Once you were in the hands of a Grand Vizier, you were dead. Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.

~ Terry Pratchett

It's political, sir. Apparently he wants a return to the values and traditions that made the city great, sir. Does he _know_ what those values and traditions _were_? said Vimes, aghast.

~ Terry Pratchett

Sybil’s female forebears had valiantly backed up their husbands as distant embassies were besieged, had given birth on a camel or in the shade of a stricken elephant, had handed around the little gold chocolates while trolls were trying to break into the compound, or had merely stayed at home and nursed such bits of husbands and sons as made it back from endless little wars.  The result was a species of woman who, when duty called, turned into solid steel.

~ Terry Pratchett