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Terry Pratchett is very quotable. This page is under construction and mostly stolen from the Pratchett Quote File.

City Watch

Guards! Guards!

"[...] a number of offences of murder by means of a blunt instrument, to whit, a dragon, and many further offences of generalized abetting [...]"

"Have another drink, not-Corporal Nobby?" said Sergeant Colon unsteadily.
"I do not mind if I do, not-Sgt Colon," said Nobby.

—The joys of working undercover

Fabricati diem, Pvnc.

—The motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

There was a thoughtful pause in the conversation as the assembled Brethren mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side.

All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee.

People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."

It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military manoeuvres, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.

Vetinari:You think there are the good people and the bad people. You are wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

Lady Ramkin's bosom rose and fell like an empire.

Vimes: It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it.

Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

"Right, you bastards, you're... you're geography!"

The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

You have the effrontery to be squeamish. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape -- we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.

Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud! and Snuff

Lancre Witches

Equal Rites

If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split-window Morris Minor.

"While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe."

Treatle nodded. "I hadn't looked at it like that," he said, "But you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance."

—Discworld scientists at work

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.

—Discworld scientists at work

They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.

"They say there's dwarf mines under the Ramtops," she said inconsequentially. "My, but them little buggers is in for a surprise."

—Granny reflects on Esk's methods of lighting a fire.

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

Wyrd Sisters

As the cauldron bubbled, an eldritch voice shrieked, "When shall we three meet again?"
Another voice said, in far more ordinary tones, "Well, I can do next Tuesday."

The calender of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

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

"'Tis not right, a woman going into such places by herself." Granny nodded. She thoroughly approved of such sentiments so long as there was, of course, no suggestion that they applied to her.

Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, and Carpe Jugulum

Wizards

The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Sourcery

Eric

No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, "Where's my clean socks?", no-one answers.

It was true about the time measurement as well. The Tezumen had realized long ago that everything was steadily getting worse and, having a terrible little-mindedness, had developed a complex system to keep track of how much worse each succeeding day was.

"There's a door."
"Where does it go?"
"It stays where it is, I think."

The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.

"So we're surrounded by absolutely nothing. There's a word for it. It's what you get when there's nothing left and everything's been used up."
"Yes. I think it's called the bill."

"What're quantum mechanics?"
"I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose."

The librarian was, ex officio, a member of the college council. No-one had been able to find any rule about orang-utans being barred, although they had surreptitiously looked very hard for one.

I hope we are not going to have any of this "Foul Fiend" business again.

—Death gets summoned by the college council

There had been some desultory talk about putting up a statue to Rincewind but, by the curious alchemy that tends to apply in these sensitive issues, this quickly became a plaque, then a note on the Roll of Honour, and finally a motion of censure for being improperly dressed.

—Unseen University politics at work

Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.

—Why summoning demons is a Bad Idea

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.

The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.

The sergeant put on the poker face which has been handed down from NCO to NCO ever since one protoamphibian told another, lower ranking protoamphibian to muster a squad of newts and Take That Beach.

Eric: "What shall I do?"
Rincewind: "Well, if you see anything crawl out of the sea and try to breathe, you could try telling it not to bother."

—At the Beginning of Time

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

The Supreme Life President of Hell wrote: "What business are we in???" He thought for a bit, and then carefully wrote, underneath: "We are in the damnation business!!!"

Interesting Times and The Last Continent

Death And Company

Mort

Mort/Quotes

Reaper Man

No one was avoiding him, it was just that an apparent random Brownian motion was gently moving everyone away.

There is no hope but us. There is no mercy but us. There is no justice. There's just us.

People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.

He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.

Drop the scythe, and turn around slowly.

No crown. No crown. Only the harvest.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom.

What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?

One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don’t want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people?
One said, Got a crush on them, sort of thing?

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone.

Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed.

it's a skeletal steed. impressive but impractical. i had one once but the head fell off.

"Windle!” he said. “We thought you were dead!”
He had to admit that it wasn’t a very good line. You didn’t put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they’ve got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour.

It took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.

The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “I haven’t felt like this since Mrs. Cake was one of my flock.”
Archchancellor Ridcully: “Mrs. Cake? What’s a Mrs. Cake?”
The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “You have . . . ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?”
Archchancellor Ridcully: “Yes.”
The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “We have someone called Mrs. Cake.”

It was another day. Cyril the cockerel stirred on his perch.
The chalked words glowed in the half light. He concentrated.
He took a deep breath.
“Dock-a-loodle-fod!”
Now that the memory problem was solved, there was only the dyslexia to worry about.

It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.

Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason.

i have received the badly-written note of the banshee.

No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly-wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids.

Traditionally, only two people ever went into the innermost sanctuary. They were the High Priest and the other priest who wasn’t High. They had been there for years, and took turns at being the high one.

No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

On the fabled hidden continent of Xxxx, somewhere near the rim, there is a lost colony of wizards who wear corks around their pointy hats and live on nothing but prawns.

"You know," said Windle, "it's a wonderful afterlife."

"Being needed is important.
Yes. But why?
"I don't know. How should I know? Because we're all in this together, I suppose. Because we don't leave our people in there. Because you're a long time dead. Because anything is better than being alone. Because humans are human."

Do you know why the prisoner in the tower watches the flight of birds?

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?

Soul Music, Hogfather and Thief of Time

Tiffany Aching and The Wee Free Men

Moist von Lipwig

Other

Pyramids

What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: "Why is it so dark in here?"

All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed.

The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one.

Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the "Marie Celeste", and the chuck keys for electric drills.

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.

Moving Pictures

The Librarian had seen many weird things in his time, but that had to be the 57th strangest.^[1]

"Woof bloody woof."

—Gaspode the Wonder Dog

It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbours * preferred* explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.

The Archchancellor's most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar's point of view, without reading them first.

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter."

—On popcorn

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.

"The thing is that Mr. Dibbler can even sell sausages to people who have bought them off him before."

"Why's it called Ming?" said the Archchancellor, on cue.
The Bursar tapped the pot. It went ming.

Azhural raised his staff. "It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork," he said. "We've got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon's about to break and we're wearing... we're wearing... sort of things, like glass, only dark... dark glass things on our eyes..."

People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.

"It looks worse than you can imagine!"
"I can imagine some pretty bad things!"
"That's why I said worse!"

"Woof. In tones of low menace."

"There's nothin' wrong with bein' a son of a bitch."

"I can explain it in Dog, but you only listen in Human."

"Well, 'scuse me. I was jus' tryin' to save the world."

"If gharstely creatures from before the Dawna Time starts wavin' at you from under your bed, jus' you don't come complainin' to me."

"Messin' around with girls in thrall to Creatures from the Void never works out, take my word for it."

"Can't sing. Can't dance. Can handle a sword a little."

"Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?" said Dibbler.
"He says he can't," said Victor. Dibbler hesitated.
"Well," he said, "I suppose he should know."

In retrospect, Victor was always a little unclear about those next few minutes. That's the way it goes. The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die.

Small Gods

"Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn."

"It's a god-eat-god world."

"You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look."

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink."

One day, a tortoise will learn how to fly.

History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.

And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!"

Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey.

"There's very good eating on one of these, you know."

"Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course."

Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter", don't stop to pack.

"Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words."

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.

Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.

Remind me again, he said, how the little horse-shaped ones move.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned.

Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.

When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror.

"What's a philosopher ?" said Brutha.
"Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting."

"Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis.
"So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water."

"He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at."

"You're not one of us."
"I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine."

Simony's eyes gleamed with the gleam of a man who had seen the future and found it covered with armour plating.

"All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private."

When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary.

"Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place."

"Why do you bother with him? He's had thousands of people killed!"
"Yes, but perhaps he thought that you wanted it."

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).

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.

"He's muffed it," said Simony. "He could have done anything with them. And he just told them the facts. You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol."

"You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing."

Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.

"All the other prophets came back with commandments!"
"Where'd they get them?"
"I ... suppose they made them up."
"You get them from the same place."

Brutha tried to nod, and thought: I'm on everyone's side. It'd be nice if, just for once, someone was on mine.

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.

Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem.

"We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies. Now we've got a truth to die for!"
"No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for."

You have perhaps heard the phrase that hell is other people?
"Yes. Yes, of course."
Death nodded. In time, he said, you will learn that it is wrong.

"I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers."

"I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts," said Brutha. "That way, everyone's happy."

"That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, 'Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.'"

"He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you'd go mad."

The Truth, The Last Hero, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Monstrous Regiment, and Unseen Academicals

Games

"As far as leaders go, the only reason I'd follow him into battle, is out of curiosity."

"A swamp dragon if i'm not mistaken. I though these things were filled with explosive gas, (the carcass explodes) oh right!

Rincewind Excuse me sir. Could you get me a tome called 'featherwinkle's concise compedium of dragons' lairs'?
Librarian ook ook eek ook.
(both engage in a conversation of ape talk)
Rincewind Well nevermind I'll come back later.
Librarian ook eek ook?
Rincewind Yes i've gibbon up. no monkey, ape ... oh damn! (the librarian hits him over the head)

"Ugh It's horrible... hang on it's me! rather chap ain't he?

Back to Discworld

↑ He had a tidy mind.

[1] He had a tidy mind.

[1]

@@ Line 78: / Line 78: @@
 {{quote|"'Tis not right, a woman going into such places by herself." Granny nodded. She thoroughly approved of such sentiments so long as there was, of course, no suggestion that they applied to her.}}
-=== ''Witches Abroad'' ===
+=== ''[[Witches Abroad]]'', ''[[Lords and Ladies]]'', ''[[Maskerade]]'', and ''[[Carpe Jugulum]]'' ===
 * [[Witches Abroad/Quotes|''Witches Abroad''/Quotes]]
-=== ''[[Lords and Ladies]]'', ''[[Maskerade]]'', and ''[[Carpe Jugulum]]'' ===
 * [[Lords and Ladies/Quotes|''Lords and Ladies''/Quotes]]
 * [[Maskerade/Quotes|''Maskerade''/Quotes]]