Quotes by Terry Pratchett

It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.

Tiffany knew what the problem was immediately. Shed seen it before, atbirthday parties. Her brother was suffering from tragic sweetdeprivation. Yes, he was surrounded by sweets. But the moment he took anysweet at all, said his sugar-addled brain, that meant he was not takingall the rest. And there were so many sweets hed never be able to eatthem all. It was too much to cope with. The only solution was to burstinto tears.

One cannot help feeling that some alternative occupation—lettuce farming, say—would offer somewhat less of a risk of being put to death by installments. Why do you persist in it?”Goldeneyes Dactylos shrugged.“I’m good at it,” he said.

Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of Wung.He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.Then there was a question about music . . .Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didnt seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like compost or bucket or wheelbarrow. But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: Got your own shovel, have you?

where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

But I see youre not standing in a bleedin shadow, Perks, nor have you done anything to change your bleedin shape, youre silhouetted against the bleedin light and your sabres shining like a diamond in a chimney-sweeps bleedin earole! Explain!Its because of the one C, sarge! said Polly, still staring straight ahead. And that is? Colour, sarge! Im wearing bleedin red and white in a bleedin grey forest, sarge!

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

. . . Mrs. Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts. . .

Most people, on waking up, accelerate through a quick panicky pre-consciousness check-up: who am I, where am I, who is he/she, good god, why am I cuddling a policemans helmet, what happened last night?And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time -theres that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting All the Gods are bastards.

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

I saved a mans life once, said Granny. Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him Id bought it from the dwarves. Thats the biggest part of doctrin, really. Most peoplell get over things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.She patted Esks hand as nicely as possible. Youre a bit young for this, she said, but as you grow older youll find most people dont set foot outside their own heads much.

Is somethin wrong? said Daft Wullie.Aye! snapped the kelda. Rob willnae tak a drink o Special Sheep Liniment!Wullies little face screwed up in instant grief.Ach, the Big Mans deid! he sobbed. Oh waily waily waily - Will ye hush yer gob, ye big mudlin! shouted Rob Anybody, standing up. I am no deid! Im trying to have a moment o existential dreed here, right? Crivens, its a puir lookout if a man cannae feel the chilly winds o Fate lashing aroound his nethers wiout folks telling him hes deid, eh?

One of the hardest lessons in young Sams life had been finding out that the people in charge werent in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

Once you were in the hands of a Grand Vizier, you were dead. Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.

Its political, sir. Apparently he wants a return to the values and traditions that made the city great, sir. Does he _know_ what those values and traditions _were_? said Vimes, aghast.

If women were as good as men theyd be a lot better!

Sybil’s female forebears had valiantly backed up their husbands as distant embassies were besieged, had given birth on a camel or in the shade of a stricken elephant, had handed around the little gold chocolates while trolls were trying to break into the compound, or had merely stayed at home and nursed such bits of husbands and sons as made it back from endless little wars.  The result was a species of woman who, when duty called, turned into solid steel.

Well, the lion is a big ol’ coward, mostly. If you want trouble, you want to tangle with the lioness. They’re killers, and they hunt together. It’s the same everywhere. If you want big grief, look to the ladies.