Quotes from Terry Pratchett

Caring for small things had to start with caring for big things, and maybe the world wasn't big enough.

Their eyes said that... they did know the meaning of the word 'fear'. It was something that happened to other people.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story. And what if your story doesn't work? You keep changing it until you find one that does.

What they did was sell invisible things. And after they'd sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn't want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn't even know it was locked. "I

For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed.

The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.

It had the thick texture of authentic Ankh water – too stiff to drink, too runny to plough.

Ridcully sighed. 'All right, you fellows,' he said. 'No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?' The other senior wizards stared at him. 'I, I, I don't think we can play it any more,' said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, 'I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces...

Sooner or later all things are numbers, yes?

There was practically nothing that he wouldn't attack, including architecture.

They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.

Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.

A guard was sitting on it, smoking a cigarette. He was black. Newt always felt guilty in the presence of black Americans, in case they blamed him for two hundred years of slave trading.

Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.

To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.

There were times when the world did not need policemen, because what it really did need was for somebody who knew what they were doing to shut it all down and start it all up again so that this time it could be done properly.

He'd been a successful soldier, as these things went; he'd generally been on the winning side, and had killed more of the enemy by good if dull tactics than his own men by bad but exciting ones.

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.

Decided to put aside ethnic differences in the cause of making more money.

Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

Sufficiently close examination changes the thing being observed.

In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practiced the ultimate democracy. You didn't need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people.

It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego.

A certain realization dawned on him. 'Oh,' he said. YES, said Death. 'Not even time to finish my cake?' NO. THERE IS NO MORE TIME, EVEN FOR CAKE. FOR YOU, THE CAKE IS OVER. YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE.