Terry Pratchett

“Theres no stink more sorrorful than the stink of wet, burnt paper. It means: the end.”

“I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it’s so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.”

“I'm just a victim of circuses”

“He'd never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom tended to explode in your face. Just when he thought he'd found it he'd be suddenly involved in what he supposed other people - thoughtless, feckless people - would call an adventure. And he'd be forced to visit many strange lands and meet exotic and colourful people, although not for very long because usually he'd be running. He'd seen the creation of the universe, although not from a good seat, and had visited Hell and the afterlife. He'd been captured, imprisoned, rescued, lost and marooned. Sometimes it had all happened on the same day.”

“All he knew was that you couldn't hope to try for the big stuff, like world peace and happiness, but you might just about be able to achieve some tiny deed that'd make the world, in a small way, a better place. Like shooting someone.”

“Taint what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be.”

“We may even find out why the duck-billed platypus.**Not why is it anything. Just why it is.”

“Oh no, not -' OF COURSE, WHAT'S SO BLOODY VEXING ABOUT THE WHOLE BUSINESS IS THAT I WAS EXPECTING TO MEET THEE IN PSEPHOPOLOLIS'But that's five hundred miles away!'YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME, THE WHOLE SYSTEM'S GOT SCREWED UP AGAIN, I CAN SEE THAT. LOOK, THERE'S NO CHANCE OF YOU-?Rincewind backed away, hands spread protectively in front of him...'Not a chance!'I COULD LEND YOU A VERY FAST HORSE.'No!'IT WON'T HURT A BIT.'No!' Rincewind turned and ran. Death watched him go, and shrugged bitterly.”

“Tell him - tell him he's very welcome. Tell him breakfast is - uh - one gold piece'. For a moment Broadman's face looked as though some vast internal struggle was going on, and then he added with a burst of generosity, 'I'll throw in yours, too.' 'Stranger,' said Rincewind levelly. 'If you stay here you will be knifed or poisoned by nightfall. But don't stop smiling, or so will I.”

“Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?”

“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.”

“The only thing more dangerous then a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency...”

“Some people are confident because they are fools. Leonard had the look of someone who was confident because, so far, he'd never found reason not to be. He would step off a high building in the happy state of mind of someone who intended to deal with the problem of the ground when it presented itself.”

“Now ... if you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.”

“People aren't just people, they are people surrounded by circumstances.”

“Both parents passed away of the Gnats on their farm out in the wilds, sir, and he was raised by peas.' 'Surely you mean on peas, Mr Groat?' 'By peas, sir”

“‎No one remembers the singer. The song remains.”

“As the eye of narrative drew back from the coffin on its stand, two things happened. One happened comparatively slowly, and this was Vargo's realisation that he never recalled the coffin having a pillow before.The other was Greebo deciding that he was as mad as hell and wasn't going to take it any more.”

“Oh, we're always all right. You remember that. We happen to other people.-Nanny Ogg”

“Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.”

“Tomorrow here is just like yesterday, warmed over.”

“All things are defined by names. Change the name, and you change the thing.”

“Esk wouldn't have known what a collective noun was if it had spat in her eye, but she knew there was a herd of goats and a coven of witches.”

“To ther Hed Wizzard, Unsene Universety, Greatings, I hop you ar well, I am sending to you won Escarrina Smith, shee hath thee maekings of wizzardery but whot may be ferther dun wyth hyr I knowe not shee is a gode worker and clene about hyr person allso skilled in diuerse arts of thee howse, I will send Monies wyth hyr May you liv longe and ende youre days in pese, And oblije, Esmerelder Weatherwaxe (Mss) Wytch.”

“Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.”

“Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.”

“It is considered in the Sto Plains that only scoundrels know the second verse of their national anthem, since anyone spending time memorizing that would be up to no good purpose.”

“Granny looked up at the zombie. He was - or, technically, had been - a tall, handsome man. He still was, only now he looked like someone who had walked through a room full of cobwebs.'What's your name, dead man?' she said.”

“If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.”

“People ought to think for themselves... The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to. (Corporal Carrot)”

“...Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was...”

“Magic never dies. It merely fades away.”

“And what do they talk about beyond the barricade, my little lad?”“Um…well, Justice an' Truth an' Freedom and stuff,” said Nobby.“Aha. Rebel talk!” said Carcer, straightening up.“Is it?” said the major.“Take it from me, major,” said Carcer. “When you get a bunch of people using words like that, they're up to no good.”

“Do you know how wizards like to be buried?""Yes!""Well, how?"Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs."Reluctantly.”

“He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five.”

“Carpe Jugulum," read Agnes aloud. "That's... well, Carpe Diem is 'Sieze the Day,' so this means-" "Go for the throat”

“Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ...Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.”

“Ponder just let it happen. It's because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.”

“It was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely-a busted cart here, a dead dog there-that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.”

“The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.”

“And then there was the young male walk. At least women swung only their hips. Young men swung everything, from the shoulders down. You have to try to occupy a lot of space. It makes you look bigger, like a tomcat fluffing his tail. The boys tried to walk big in self-defense against all those other big boys out there. I’m bad, I’m fierce, I’m cool, I’d like a pint of shandy and me mam wants me home by nine.”

“The river, it's banks as yet untamed wandered languidly through thickets of rush and papyrus. Ibises waded in the shallows; in the deeps hippos rose and sank slowly like pickled eggs.”

“Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.”

“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 fiber and, in some cases, backbone.”

“[Y]ou weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and always will be high... People say you don't find witchcraft; witchcraft finds you. But you've found it, even if at the time you didn't know what it was you were finding, and you grabbed it by its scrawny neck and made it work for you.”

“One person is nothing. Two people are a nation.”

“Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet... and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.”

“The second mouse gets the cheese!”

“Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it while it remains unmoved. You had to be the centre of the seesaw so the pain flowed through you, not into you. It was very hard. But she could do it!”

“OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death. OTHERWISE, WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?”