Top 100 Pratchett Terry Quotes
#1. The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.
Terry Pratchett
#2. Best way to get something done is to give it to someone who is busy, said Vetinari.
Terry Pratchett
#3. It was amazing to see that all people needed to make them happy was food and drink and other people.
Terry Pratchett
#4. The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
Terry Pratchett
#5. Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
Terry Pratchett
#6. Listen, Peaches, trickery is what humans are all about," said the voice of Maurice. "They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.
Terry Pratchett
#7. Make ourselves attractive to students?" said the Archchancellor. "Mr Stibbons, the whole idea of a university is that it should be hard to get into.
Terry Pratchett
#8. What's to be afraid of?' she managed. 'Us,' said Granny Weatherwax, smugly. The
Terry Pratchett
#9. Nijel was one of those people who, if you say 'don't look now,' would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable.
Terry Pratchett
#10. When they hunt, every dog knows the position of every other dog. I wanted them to understand the duality of team and player. The strength of the player is the team and the strength of the team is the player.
Terry Pratchett
#11. There was this about vampires : they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were ... what was the word ... deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.
Terry Pratchett
#12. It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.
Terry Pratchett
#13. Too much alleged 'fantasy' is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off.
Terry Pratchett
#14. You got no soul, Cap'n," he said. "When a stranger comes into the city under the thrall of the dragon and challenges it with a glittery sword, weeell, there's only one outcome, ain't there? It's probably destiny.
Terry Pratchett
#15. 'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.
Terry Pratchett
#16. They didn't have to be funny - they were father jokes.
Terry Pratchett
#17. It makes you wonder if there is anything to astrology after all.' 'Oh, there is,' said Susan. 'Delusion, wishful thinking and gullibility.
Terry Pratchett
#18. Only an academic could state the obvious and pass it off as wisdom." -Moist Von Lipwig (T.P., Going Postal)
Terry Pratchett
#19. Like many people of limited intellectual scope, Snouty did take what he could do very seriously.
Terry Pratchett
#21. There was a click. There was a noise like a partridge. There was a thud.
There was silence.
Terry Pratchett
#22. 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
#23. The Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Terry Pratchett
#24. WHERE'S MY COW?!
IS THAT MY COW?!
HRRRUUUUGGGH!!!!
THAT'S NOT MY COW!
THAT'S A HIPPOPOTAMOUS!
Terry Pratchett
#25. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#26. A rather jolly little pony, quite possibly wearing a straw hat with holes cut out for its ears.
Terry Pratchett
#27. Moist realized that there had to be an explanation for this, but the only one he could think of now was: It's strange.
Terry Pratchett
#28. The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.
Terry Pratchett
#29. Amazin'.' he said again. 'He just looks as though he's thinking, right?'
'Er ... yes.'
'But he's not actually thinking?'
'Er ... no.'
'So ... he just gives the impression of thinking but really it's just a show?'
'Er ... yes.'
Just like everyone else, then really,' said Ridcully
Terry Pratchett
#30. Yes, sir, thank you, sir, and I wouldn't trust me one little inch, sir. I knows a bad one when I sees them. I have a mirror.
Terry Pratchett
#31. But what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?
Terry Pratchett
#32. This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.
Terry Pratchett
#33. Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.
Terry Pratchett
#35. I express preference for a chronological sequence of events which precludes a violence.
Terry Pratchett
#36. Apply logic in places where it wasn't intended to exist.
Terry Pratchett
#37. Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.
Terry Pratchett
#38. High magic requires a great clarity of thought, you see, and women's talents do not lie in that direction. Their brains tend to overheat.
Terry Pratchett
#39. I never understood that story, anyway," said Nanny. "I mean, if I knew I'd got a heel that would kill me if someone stuck a spear in it, I'd go into battle wearing very heavy boots -
Terry Pratchett
#41. Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.
Terry Pratchett
#42. People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.
Terry Pratchett
#43. She was almost there. She could feel the weight of herself, the ponderousness of her body, the distant memories of the dawn of time when rock was molten and free. For the first time in her life she knew what it was like to have balconies.
Terry Pratchett
#44. Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't.
Terry Pratchett
#45. I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
Terry Pratchett
#47. We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?" "Why?" "It saves time.
Terry Pratchett
#48. Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Terry Pratchett
#49. I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting "Forward, brave comrades!" you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!
Terry Pratchett
#50. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. (This is not actually true. The raid to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesman. On weekends, many of the younger demons go ice skating down it.)
Terry Pratchett
#51. No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise?
Terry Pratchett
#52. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
Terry Pratchett
#53. Ach, people are always telling us not to do things" said Rob Anybody, "that's how we ken the most interesting things to do.
Terry Pratchett
#54. Everything happens for a reason, except possibly football.
(in Thief of Time)
Terry Pratchett
#57. Don't you understand?" snarled Rincewind. "We are going over the Edge, godsdammit!"
"Can't we do anything about it?"
"No!"
"Then I can't see the sense in panicking," said Twoflower calmly.
Terry Pratchett
#58. It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he'd decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.
Terry Pratchett
#59. And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, at least when it remembered to.
Terry Pratchett
#60. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
Terry Pratchett
#62. The street was full of animals, milling around uncertainly. When animals are in a state of uncertainty they get nervous, and the street was already, as it were, paved with anxiety.
Terry Pratchett
#63. My father always said, he said, Do not peddle in the affairs of wizards ...
Terry Pratchett
#64. My word, we live and learn, don't we.' And you certainly learn, he added in the privacy of his head.
Terry Pratchett
#65. There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
Terry Pratchett
#67. Ah, I know that," said Tiffany, as the boat rocked on the swell. "Whales aren't dangerous, because they just eat very small things ... "
"Row like the blazes, lads!" Rob Anybody yelled.
Terry Pratchett
#68. Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!
Terry Pratchett
#69. He wondered how much trouble he could get into for shooting non-American civilians.
Terry Pratchett
#70. People kept on talking about the true king of Ankh-Morpork, but history taught a cruel lesson. It said - often in words of blood - that the true king was the one who got crowned."
Terry Pratchett
#72. Yeah, I suppose it was a history. I wanted it to be more of a geography, but she kept slappin' my hand.' Trev
Terry Pratchett
#74. It was a large room, heavily outfitted with the usual badly ventilated furnaces, rows of bubbling crucibles, and one stuffed alligator. Things floated in jars. The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.
Terry Pratchett
#75. The apothecary's name was Owlglass. He hummed to himself as he worked in his back room. He'd found a new type of blue fluff, which he was grinding down. It was probably good for curing something. He'd have to try it out on people until he found out what.
Terry Pratchett
#76. Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.
Terry Pratchett
#77. YOU FEAR TO DIE?
It's not that I don't want ... I mean, I've always ... it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break ...
Terry Pratchett
#78. Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.
Terry Pratchett
#79. There was a much smaller room on the other side. It was merely the size of, say, a cathedral. And it was lined floor to ceiling with more hourglasses that Susan could just see dimly in the light from the big room. She stepped inside and snapped her fingers.
Terry Pratchett
#80. One of the things forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.
Terry Pratchett
#82. In a cottage deep in the forest lived the wicked old witch ... it was a cottage out of the nastier kind of fairy tale
Terry Pratchett
#83. If you want something done, give it to someone who's busy!
Terry Pratchett
#84. Tell someone you are going to rob them and all that will happen is that you'll get a reputation as a truthful man.
Terry Pratchett
#85. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where "traditional values" meant "hang someone." He did not have a problem with this, broadly speaking, but it never hurt to understand your employer.
Terry Pratchett
#86. Thieves OUT, Thieves OUT!" cackled his elderly companion." Several others took
Terry Pratchett
#87. She gave him a wink which would have got a younger woman jailed.
Terry Pratchett
#88. A unicorn is a big horse that comes to a point, really
Terry Pratchett
#89. You know, sometimes I envy you. It must be nice to be a wolf. Just for a while." "It has its drawbacks." Like fleas, she thought, as they locked up the museum. And the food. And the constant nagging feeling that you should be wearing three bras at once.
Terry Pratchett
#90. There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.
Terry Pratchett
#91. 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
#92. Fascinating, said the Patrician, and went back to not listening to Dibbler. He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him.
Terry Pratchett
#93. 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
#94. He could hear his granny speaking. "No one's too poor to buy soap." Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.
Terry Pratchett
#95. Weddings are quite similar to funerals in that, apart from the main players, when it's all over, people are never quite sure what they should be doing next, which is why they see if there is any wine left.
Terry Pratchett
#96. When the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to.
Terry Pratchett
#97. You run away a lot," said one of the voices. "That is good. You are a survivor." "Survivor? I've nearly been killed dozens of times!" "Exactly.
Terry Pratchett
#98. This is not a book about Australia. No, it's about somewhere entirely different which happens to be, here and there, a bit ... Australian. Still ... no worries, right?
Terry Pratchett
#99. He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.
Terry Pratchett
#100. And now, because of a song, Vimes, a simple piece of music, Vimes, soft as a breath, stranger than a mountain, some very powerful states have agreed to work together to heal the problems of another autonomous state and, almost as collateral, turn some animals into people at a stroke.
Terry Pratchett
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