Terry Pratchett Quotes

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.

~ Terry Pratchett

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.

~ Terry Pratchett

At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.

~ Terry Pratchett

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.

~ 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

I've stolen books. They're the only thing worth taking that don't belong to you.

~ Sully Tarnish

When Geoffrey was away, the goat often took himself off. He had soon got the goats at Granny’s cottage doing his bidding, and Nanny Ogg said once that she had seen what she called ‘that devil goat’ sitting in the middle of a circle of feral goats up in the hills. She named him ‘The Mince of Darkness’ because of his small and twinkling hooves, and added, ‘Not that I don’t like him, stinky as he is. I’ve always been one for the horns, as you might say. Goats is clever. Sheep ain’t. No offence, my dear.

~ Terry Pratchett

The key to having good scales is a healthy diet of venison when you’re just a wee dragon lad.

~ Sully Tarnish

Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief …

~ Terry Pratchett

These were dangerous thoughts, he knew. They were the kind that crept up on a Watchman when the chase was over and it was just you and him, facing one another in that breathless little pinch between the crime and the punishment.And maybe a Watchman had seen civilization with the skin ripped off one time too many and stopped acting like a Watchman and started acting like a normal human being and realized that the click of the crossbow or the sweep of the sword would make all the world so clean.And you couldn’t think like that, even about vampires. Even though they’d take the lives of other people because little lives don’t matter and what the hell can we take away from them?And, too, you couldn’t think like that because they gave you a sword and a badge and that turned you into something else and that had to mean there were some thoughts you couldn’t think.Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good Watchman, Carrot always said. To light a candle in the dark.

~ Terry Pratchett

Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.

~ Terry Pratchett

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

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

~ Terry Pratchett

People said that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but it wasn't true. There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the incorrigibly lawless.

~ Terry Pratchett

That’s why we all hate ’em, he thought. Those expressionless eyes watch us, those big faces turn to follow us, and doesn’t it just look as if they’re making notes and taking names? If you heard that one had bashed in someone’s head over in Quirm or somewhere, wouldn’t you just love to believe it? A voice inside, a voice which generally came to him only in the quiet hours of the night or, in the old days, half-way down a whiskey bottle, added: Given how we use them, maybe we’re scared because we know we deserve it…

~ Terry Pratchett

Commander, I always used to consider that you had a definite anti-authoritarian streak in you.”“Sir?”“It seems that you have managed to retain this even though you are authority.”“Sir?”“That’s practically zen.

~ Terry Pratchett

You know it’s going to be Mary the Maid, or someone like her, and there’s going to be two men and she will end up with the nice one, and there has to be misunderstandings, and they never do anything more than kiss and it’s absolutely guaranteed that, for example, an exciting civil war or an invasion by trolls or even a scene with any cooking in it is not going to happen. The best you can expect is a thunderstorm.

~ Terry Pratchett

It's supposed to be jolly, with mistletoe and holly... and other things ending in olly.

~ Terry Pratchett

Cats do not hunt seals. They would hunt them if they knew what seals and where to find them. But they do not know, so it's okay.

~ Terry Pratchett

Wizards don’t believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made things work, that gave the world its purpose. It was just that they were best avoided close up.

~ Terry Pratchett

That's the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It's got no soul, sir, no heart.

~ Terry Pratchett

Mind you,” said Ponder, “the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death—” “Chicken soup and croutons,” said Ridcully. Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination.

~ Terry Pratchett