Quotes from Terry Pratchett

And you know what? Books live. The pages remember!

Anger helped Vimes up the last leg of the climb. Anger at himself and whoever it was who had punctured his holiday. But it was worrying: he had wanted something to happen and now it had. Somebody was dead. Sometimes you had to take a look at yourself and then look away.

Whether you wanted it or not, you were born, you did the best you could, and then, whether you really wanted to or not, you died.

Ahh! They're all just pins!

He opened the box and took out the kitten. It stared at him with the normal mad amazement of kittens everywhere. I DON'T HOLD WITH CRUELTY TO CATS, said Death, putting it gently on the floor.

XXI. But Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, This is the Sign I give you: XXII. If You Do Not See What You Require, Please Ask. From The Book of Nome, Regulations v. XXI-XXII

There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is "Don't do what you will, do what I say.

You must make a place for fear, fear under control. We think that the head is important, that the brain sits like a monarch on the throne of the body. But the body is powerful too, and the brain cannot survive without it.

Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those curs who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razor blades from the candyfloss of life

Bugger off sweetheart Nanny's busy

Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.

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.

Then Tak looked upon the stone and it was trying to come alive, and Tak smiled, and wrote All things strive. And for the service the stone had given, he fashioned it into the first Troll, and delighted in the life that came unbidden.

squernt" ("the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper")

The truth of the matter was that Juliet would look good in a sack. Somehow everything she wore fitted perfectly. Glenda, on the other hand, never found anything good in her size and indeed seldom anything in her size. In theory, something should fit, but all she ever found was facts, which are so unbecoming.

It's rude to stare, said the troll. Its mouth opened with a little crest of foam, and shut again in exactly the same way that water closes over a stone. Is it? Why? asked Rincewind. How does he hold himself together, his mind screamed at him. Why doesn't he spill?

It's not staying in the same place that's the problem," said Nanny, "it's not letting your mind wander.

magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

It's All Officers, sir. They broke into a run. You always did for an All Officers. The people in trouble might well be you.

The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

It was the terror of impermanence, the knowledge that all this would pass away, that a beautiful voice or a wonderful figure was something whose arrival you couldn't control and whose departure you couldn't delay.

The kicking and punching stopped only when it became apparent that all the mob was attacking was itself. And, since the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters, it was never very clear to anyone what had happened.

Big fishy! said Wentworth again. That's right! Tiffany said, delighted. Big fishy! And what makes it particularly interesting is that a whale isn't a fish! It is in fact a mammal, just like a cow! Did you just say that? said her Second Thoughts, as all the pictsies stared at her an the boat spun in the surf. The first time he's ever said anything that wasn't about sweeties or weewee and you just corrected him?

And then there were the readers, Gawd bless them. We must have signed hundreds of thousands of copies for them by now. The books are often well read to the point of physical disintegration; if we run across a shiny new copy, it's usually because the owner's previous five have been stolen by friends, struck by lightning or eaten by giant termites in Sumatra. You have been warned. Oh, and we understand there's a copy in the Vatican library. It'd be nice to think so.