Quotes from Terry Pratchett

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things.

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?

But we're a university! We have to have a library! said Ridcully. It adds tone . What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library? Students, said Senior Wrangler morosely.

What did I tell you about Mister Safety Catch?' said Vimes weakly. When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend,' recited Detritus, saluting.

The purpose of this lectchoor is to let you know where we are. We are in the deep cack. It couldn't be worse if it was raining arseholes. Any questions?

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.

The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).

So much universe, and so little time.

Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

This time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

Susan says, don't get afraid, get angry.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it, said War testily, the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocalypse.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Why bother with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?

Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.

It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn't do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn't care because it didn't know what "fair" meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.