Terry Pratchett

“Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.”

“I notice you didn't laugh, Mr. Black!''No, Your Majesty. We are forbidden to laugh at the things kings say, sire, because otherwise we would be at it all day.”

“No cabe duda de que poseemos un auténtico talento natural para esta clase de cosas -pensó Teppic-. Unos simples animales jamás podrían comportarse de esta manera. Ser realmente estúpido es algo que sólo está al alcance de un ser humano.”

“Soy un forastero en una tierra familiar.”

“Hay quienes afirman que en Ankh-Morpork una vida no vale nada. No pueden estar más equivocados, naturalmente, ya que el precio de una vida no para de subir. Morir, en cambio, no te costará una moneda.”

“Their families cordially detested one another.”

“You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.”

“You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger* (* Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.) differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients. . .”

“Teppic hadn’t been educated. Education had just settled on him, like dandruff.”

“Cheese runners shouted at it, tried to grab it, and flailed at it with sticks, but the piratical cheese scythed onward, reaching the bottom just ahead of the terrible carnage of men and cheeses as they piled up. Then it rolled back to the top and sat there demurely while still gently vibrating.At the bottom of the slope, fights were breaking out among the cheese jockeys who were still capable of punching somebody, and since everybody was watching that, Tiffany took the opportunity to snatch up Horace and shove him in her bag. After all, he was hers. Well, that was to say she had made him, although something odd must have gone into the mix since Horace was the only cheese that would eat mice and, if you didn't nail him down, other cheeses as well.”

“Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.”

“Neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success.”

“There would be a price... But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?”

“...the little man's total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.”

“Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.”

“She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner, and was tall in every respect except height. Amazingly, she'd apparently been able to keep this a secret from people.”

“If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.”

“I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.”

“IT'S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE, said the Hogfather. "You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?" YES. NOW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF.”

“It was one of those problematic occasions with long silences, sporadic coughs, and people saying isolated things like, "Well, isn't this nice.”

“Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel--merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”

“I don't regret it, you know. I would do it all again. Children are our hope for the future."THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death."What does it contain, then?"ME.”

“Kasandra took charge of things. She was the most organized person Johnny knew. In fact she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person, and it overflowed in every direction.”

“Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.”

“Everything’s a bit scruffy, but such a wonderful day that you have to be glad to be born and don’t even mind other people having been born either.”

“The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.”

“Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.”

“Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face.”

“People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.”

“Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.”

“When people say "clearly" something that means there's a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren't clear at all.”

“The short conversation that follows eventually led to a tree religion. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree and led a clean decent and upstanding life could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.”

“The city's full of people who you just see around.”

“One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't 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.”

“[...] the awesome splendor of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.”

“He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.”

“Anyone with half a mind could see that," said Tiffany.Miss Tick sighed. "Yes. But sometimes it's so hard to find half a mind when you need one.”

“Don't wish, Miss Tick had said. Do things.”

“I know it’s not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig!""My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow…""Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!”

“Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!”

“...para darse cuenta de que cualquier poder que hubiera en la demonología lo tenían los demonios. Usarlo para tu propio beneficio sería como intentar matar ratones dándoles golpes con una serpiente de cascabel.”

“Vimes died. The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, and the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished and gurgled into the sinktrap of oblivion. And gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold! There was a new heaven - or possibly not. And Disc and Io and and possibly verily life crawled out of the sea - or possibly didn't because it had been made by the gods, and lizards turned to less scaly lizards - or possibly did not. And lizards turned into birds and bugs turned into butterflies and a species of apple turned into banana and a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realised life was better when you didn't have to spend your time hanging onto something. And in only a few billion years evolved trousers and ornamental stripey hats. Lastly the game of Crocket. And there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.”

“You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.”

“The Four Horsemen whose Ride presages the end of the world are known to be Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But even less significant events have their own Horsemen. For example, the Four Horsemen of the Common Cold are Sniffles, Chesty, Nostril, and Lack of Tissues; the Four Horsemen whose appearance foreshadows any public holiday are Storm, Gales, Sleet, and Contra-flow.”

“That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.”

“Although the scythe isn't pre-eminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome.”

“What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?”

“The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off.There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.”

“Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.”

“DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE.-Death”