Top 100 Terry Pratchett Quotes
#1. To be a leader you have to learn to shout! But after you've learned to shout, you have to learn not to!
Terry Pratchett
#2. The past needs to be remembered. 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.
Terry Pratchett
#3. A rather jolly little pony, quite possibly wearing a straw hat with holes cut out for its ears.
Terry Pratchett
#4. Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
Terry Pratchett
#5. She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner, and was tall in every respect except height. Amazingly, she'd apparently been able to keep this a secret from people.
Terry Pratchett
#6. Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.
Terry Pratchett
#8. No wonder dragons were always ill. They relied on permanent stomach trouble for supplies of fuel. Most
Terry Pratchett
#9. We're really good at it, Teppic thought. Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid. I
Terry Pratchett
#10. It wasn't just that his brain was writing checks that his body couldn't cash.
Terry Pratchett
#11. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.
Terry Pratchett
#12. Well, well," he said, "we live and learn, just like you said.
Terry Pratchett
#13. I feel like a million dollars don't you? ... Good, Lets go get some.
Terry Pratchett
#14. Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories.
Terry Pratchett
#15. No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.
Terry Pratchett
#16. Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant. I SEE, he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat-haters. YOU LIKE GREAT BIG DOGS, I IMAGINE.
Terry Pratchett
#17. The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
Terry Pratchett
#18. Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.
Terry Pratchett
#19. The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.
Terry Pratchett
#20. It is impossible to accommodate everyone and twice as impossible to please all the dwarfs.
Terry Pratchett
#21. You will have worked out that there is a race in this world that steals and kills and spreads disease and despoils what it cannot use, said the voice of Spider.
Terry Pratchett
#22. Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realize that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.
Terry Pratchett
#23. He preached as if he had a flaming sword in his hand. Bats fell out of the rafters. The organ started up by itself. The water sloshed in the font.
Terry Pratchett
#24. And just when you'd think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.
Terry Pratchett
#25. Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for heterosexuality.
Terry Pratchett
#26. DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE.
-Death
Terry Pratchett
#27. Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel
merely terribly, terribly good at his job.
Terry Pratchett
#28. You couldn't put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place when the inevitable just went and waited.
Terry Pratchett
#29. The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain
the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.
Terry Pratchett
#30. I've been following the noble profession of hermiting here for nigh on fifty-seven years, practising piety, sobriety, celibacy and the pursuit of true wisdom in the tradition of my father and grandfather and great-grandfather before me.
Terry Pratchett
#31. I mean, it's one thing saying you've got the best god, but sayin' it's the only real one is a bit of a cheek, in my opinion. I know where I can find at least two any day of the week. And they say everyone starts out bad and only gets good by believin' in Om, which is frankly damn nonsense.
Terry Pratchett
#32. The Luggage was also extremely protective of its owner. It would be hard to describe its attitude to the rest of creation, but one could start with the phrase "bloody-minded malevolence" and work up from there. Conina
Terry Pratchett
#33. Bursar?"
"Yes, Archchancellor?"
"You ain't a member of some secret society or somethin', are you?"
"Me? No, Archchancellor."
"Then it'd be a damn good idea to take your underpants off your head.
Terry Pratchett
#34. Vimes nodded glumly. It was amazing how many people were prepared to do business with a man they'd met in a pub.
Terry Pratchett
#35. Don't start weaving a social hypothesis in front of an angry woman holding a blade.
Terry Pratchett
#36. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low-grade paranoia.
Terry Pratchett
#37. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to.
Terry Pratchett
#38. Reality so often fails when it comes to small, satisfying details, she thought.
Terry Pratchett
#39. The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.
Terry Pratchett
#40. The king nodded. "What are the priests doing about this?" he said.
"I saw them throwing one another in the river, sir."
The king nodded again. "That sounds about right," he said. "They've come to their senses at last.
Terry Pratchett
#41. Don't look back!" "Why not?" "Because I just did! Run faster!
Terry Pratchett
#42. It was easy to respect an invisible god. It was the ones that turned up everywhere, often drunk, that put people off.
Terry Pratchett
#44. The period of time it takes a pictsie to go from normal to mad fighting mood is so tiny it can't be measured on the smallest clock.
Terry Pratchett
#45. Could I please amend that suggestion? Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?
Terry Pratchett
#46. They want dancing girls! They want thrills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!
Terry Pratchett
#48. Heroes get kingdoms and princesses, and they take regular exercise, and when they smile the light glints off their teeth, ting
Terry Pratchett
#49. As we all know, the Discworld is a flat planet - like a geological pizza, but without the anchovies.
Terry Pratchett
#50. He knew how she felt. It was the way he felt himself, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion. A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall.
Terry Pratchett
#51. S called a lute," said Caleb, through a mouthful of walrus.
"Whut?"
"IT'S CALLED A LUTE, HAMISH!"
"Aye, I used to loot!
Terry Pratchett
#52. I WAS NOT EXPECTING A NAC MAC FEEGLE TODAY, said Death. OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE WORN PROTECTIVE CLOTHING, HA HA.
Terry Pratchett
#53. Falling down a flight of steps with a dagger in your back is a disease caused by unwise opening of the mouth.
Terry Pratchett
#54. It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?
Terry Pratchett
#55. Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed. Death
Terry Pratchett
#56. Think critically about what you are told. Do not accept the word of authority unthinkingly. Science is not a belief system: no belief system instructs you to question the system itself. Science does. (There are many scientists, however, who treat it as a belief system. Be wary of them.)
Terry Pratchett
#57. I'm not superstitious. I'm a witch. Witches aren't superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.
Terry Pratchett
#58. What I say is, if a witch can't look after herself, she's got no business calling herself a witch.
Terry Pratchett
#59. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
Terry Pratchett
#60. You mean it's my destiny? she said at last.
Granny shrugged. Something like that. Probably. Who knows?
Terry Pratchett
#61. Most people don't set foot outside their own heads much.
Terry Pratchett
#62. The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.
Terry Pratchett
#63. I'm not hungry!' A human voice, but with a sulky whine in it that suggested that its owner had been given too many sweets when he was young and not enough shoutings-at. It was the kind of voice that's used to having its life with the crusts cut off.
Terry Pratchett
#64. Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.
Terry Pratchett
#65. The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.
Terry Pratchett
#66. Sergeant Colon was lost in admiration. He'd seen people bluff on a bad hand, but he'd never seen anyone bluff with no cards.
Terry Pratchett
#67. Quite amazing, isn't it, Mister Lipwig?' he said cheerfully through the smoke. 'Though isn't it a pity that they can only run on rails? I can't imagine what the world would be like if everyone had their own steam locomotive. Abominable.
Terry Pratchett
#68. Preston, I don't think this creature could ever find its way into your head. Quite apart from anything else, it seems pretty crowded and complicated to me.
Terry Pratchett
#69. They poisoned all their priests and tried enlightened atheism instead, which still meant they could kill as many people as they liked but didn't have to get up so early to do it. The
Terry Pratchett
#70. She'd never really liked the book. It seemed to her that it tried to tell her what to do and what to think. Don't stray from the path, don't open that door, but hate the wicked witch because she is wicked. Oh, and believe that shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife.
Terry Pratchett
#72. You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
Terry Pratchett
#73. The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them ...
Terry Pratchett
#74. This was the time, when night wasn't quite over but day hadn't quite begun, when thoughts stood out bright and clear and without disguise.
Terry Pratchett
#75. I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.
Terry Pratchett
#76. Never cross a woman with a star on a stick, young lady. They've got a mean streak.
Terry Pratchett
#77. In the house of Death there is no time but the present. (There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. It was just an older one.)
Terry Pratchett
#78. How much experience do you think I've got in these matters? Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don't let you go around again until you get it right.
Terry Pratchett
#79. Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows
sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.
Terry Pratchett
#80. Folk music was not approved of in Llamedos, and the singing of it was rigorously discouraged; it was felt that anyone espying a fair young maiden one morning in May was entitled to take whatever steps they considered appropriate without someone writing it down.
Terry Pratchett
#81. Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Terry Pratchett
#82. In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.
Terry Pratchett
#83. Oh, don't be absurd, man.' The Prime Minister sat back in his chair. 'Come on. We can't just ban a thing because we can't control it.'
The minister responsible for health and safety looked startled. 'I don't see why not. It's never stopped us before.
Terry Pratchett
#84. Death stared at her. He'd never before experienced an unsatisfied customer. He was at a loss. Finally he gave up. BEGONE, YOU BLACK AND MIDNIGHT HAG, he said. The
Terry Pratchett
#85. Mr Dibbler can even sell sausages to people that have bought them off him before ... And a man who could sell Mr Dibbler's sausages twice could sell anything
Terry Pratchett
#86. Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.
Terry Pratchett
#87. Everyday took an age to go by, which was odd, because days plural went past like a stampede.
Terry Pratchett
#88. Imagination is only intelligence having fun. A healthy mind knows how to switch between worlds, and which one you need to eat and sleep in.
Terry Pratchett
#89. I've got nothing but the greatest respect for Mrs. Gogol," said Granny. "A fine woman. But talks a bit too much. If I was her, I'd have had a couple of big nails right through that thing by now."
"You would, too," said Nanny. "It's a good thing you're good, ain't it.
Terry Pratchett
#90. You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you make it right.
Terry Pratchett
#91. Oh, we're always all right. You remember that. We happen to other people.
-Nanny Ogg
Terry Pratchett
#92. I hate cats."
Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.
"I SEE," he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat haters.
Terry Pratchett
#93. Ignorance is a wonderful thing - it's the state you have to be in before you can really learn anything.
Terry Pratchett
#94. Any human who tried to stamp on a Feegle would find that the little man he thought was under his boot was now in fact climbing up his trouser leg, and after that the day could only get worse.
Terry Pratchett
#95. They shed a rather unpleasant glow that didn't so much illuminate, as outline the darkness.
Terry Pratchett
#96. He's a man of few words, and he doesn't know what either of them means, people said, but not when he was within hearing.
Terry Pratchett
#97. EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS, STAYS HAPPENED.
"What kind of philosophy is that?"
THE ONLY ONE THAT WORKS.
Terry Pratchett
#98. Tiffany looked around - the hiver looked around - and thought: I've got to be the strongest. When I am strongest, I shall be safe. That one is weak. She thinks you can buy magic.
Terry Pratchett
#99. I'm quite sure primitive people have no difficulties surviving in a place like this, and think of all the things we have that our rude forefathers lacked.
Terry Pratchett
#100. Caring for small things had to start with caring for big things, and maybe the world wasn't big enough.
Terry Pratchett
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