Quotes by Terry Pratchett

“And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.”

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”

“Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree”

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.”

“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”

“The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.”

“You cant trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and theres nothing you can do about it, so lets have a drink”

“The little flickering part of his brain that was still sparking coherent thought through the fog of mind-numbing terror that filled Colons head was telling him that he was so far out of his depth that the fish had lights on their noses”

“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces”

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the players, (ie everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who wont tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

“Hed noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: It fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but”

“Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bull, was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it”

“Taxation is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo. And Im afraid to say, that these days, all Im getting is moo.”

“I meant, said Ipslore bitterly, what is there in this world that truly makes living worth while? Death thought about it Cats, he said eventually, Cats are Nice”

“Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up”

“You cant trample infidels when youre a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.”

“There was always someone ready to cut the heir with a knife”

“The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.”

“Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on it’s back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so this is probably the only place in the Multiverse where it is sometimes necessary for an elephant to move a leg to allow the sun to go past. Exactly why it is this way, may never be known.Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rational velocities, and decided to have bit of fun.”

“The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills. The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which Gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an archaic voice shrieked: “When shall we three meet again?!!” There was a pause.Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: “Well I can do next Tuesday.””