Terry Pratchett Quotes, taken from
www.dangimcool.com It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as "slightly foxed", although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.
He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk. The old shaman said carefully, "You didn't just see two men go through upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?" The boy looked at him levelly. "Certainly not," he said. The old man heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness for that," he said. "Neither did I."
The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable here that "all men spoke of his prowess" any bard who valued his life would add hastily "except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him." They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. "It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"
It is a fact that although the Death of the Discworld is, in his own words, an ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION, he long ago gave up using the traditional skeletal horses, because of the bother of having to stop all the time to wire bits back on. "You won't get away with this," said Cutwell. He thought for a bit and added, "Well, you will probably get away with it, but you'll feel bad about it on your deathbed and you'll wish -- " He stopped talking.
Of course, Ankh-Morpork's citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed. It became apparent that one reason why the Ice Giants were known as the Ice Giants was because they were, well, giants. The other was that they were made of ice.
The calender of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out. In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
"Yes, bugger all that." said Nanny. "Let's curse somebody." Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the "Marie Celeste", and the chuck keys for electric drills.
All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee. People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."
A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it. Thunder rolled. ... It rolled a six.
"There's a door"
- "Where does it go?"
- "It stays where it is, I think." The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.
The sergeant put on the poker face which has been handed down from NCO to NCO ever since one protoamphibian told another, lower ranking protoamphibian to muster a squad of newts and Take That Beach. - "What shall I do?"
- "Well, if you see anything crawl out of the sea and try to breathe, you could try telling it not to bother."
By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold. "If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter."
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. Azhural raised his staff. "It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork," he said. "We've got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon's about to break and we're wearing... we're wearing... sort of things, like glass, only dark... dark glass things on our eyes..."
People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory. He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.
No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.
The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match. "You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look."
History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles. And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!"
"Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course." Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.
"He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at." When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary.
Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded. No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles].
And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork. It's not enough to be able to pick up a sword. You have to know which end to poke into the enemy.
He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no one knew where he kept it. The Alchemist's Guild is opposite the Gambler's Guild. Usually. Sometimes it's above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.
The question seldom addressed is where Medusa had snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting the top of the deodorant bottle. "I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf,
And me an' my friends can walk towards you with our hats on backwards in a menacing way,
Yo!"
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. "Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad."
Many an ancient lord's last words had been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh." People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys. "Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely."
I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE. "Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"
It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to "serve the community" by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways. She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.
We took pity on him because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that. Vimes's grin was as funny as the one that moves very fast towards drowning men. And has a fin on top.
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life." "When it's time to stop living, I will certainly make Death my number one choice!"
They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don't have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past. Nanny could find an innuendo in "Good morning." She could certainly find one in "innuendo."
"Vampires are very anal-retentive, you see?"
"I shouldn't like meeting one that was the opposite," said Nanny. Perdita thought that not obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like "Don't fall into this huge pit of spikes" were there for a purpose.
Those who are inclined to casual cruelty say that inside a fat girl is a thin girl and a lot of chocolate. One or two of the old barrows had been exposed over the years, their huge stones attracting their own folklore. If you left your unshod horse at one of them overnight and placed sixpence on the stone, in the morning the sixpence would be gone and you'd never see your horse again, either...
You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they? Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home. ... walking like a man carrying a thermos flask of something that might cause, if he dropped it or even thought about dropping it, the sort of explosion that impels grey-beards to make statements like "And where this crater is now, once stood the city of Wah-Shing-Ton", in SF B-movies.
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow
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