Terry Pratchett

“The jurisdiction of a good man extends to the end of the world.”

“Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.”

“Any true wizard, faced with a sign like 'Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We're not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,' would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss is about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, 'We told him not to.”

“El C. I. de una muchedumbre es el C. I. de su miembro más estúpido dividido por el número de sus integrantes.”

“Su aversión a los libros tenía un fundamento moral, ya que había oído decir que muchos de ellos estaban escritos por gente muerta.”

“Aguardaba con paciencia hasta que la manada de Criaturas pasaba de largo, devorando el contenido de libros selectos y dejando tras ellas montoncitos de delgados volúmenes de crítica literaria. Y había otras cosas, cosas que esquivaba a toda velocidad y trataba de no mirar... Por encima de todo, debía esquivar los tópicos.”

“Tenía que ser hembra. De eso no quedaba duda. Guardaba un cierto parecido con las estatuillas de las diosas de la fertilidad que habían tallado hacía miles de años los hombres de las cavernas (...) Era la deriva continental con curvas. Empezó a cantar.”

“... el nivel de decibelios estaba ya en las regiones donde el ruido es una fuerza sólida que hace vibrar los globos oculares. (...) Víctor aprovechó la ocasión para mirar a su alrededor ahora que (...) los tímpanos se le habían entumecido por pura piedad.”

“Siguiendo el camino más duro, que aun así no es tan duro como el camino fácil.”

“The point I’m making,” said Yo-Less, “is that you’ve got to help your friends, right?” He turned to Johnny. ”Now, personally, I think you’re very nearly totally disturbed and suffering from psychosomatica and hearing voices and seeing delusions,” he said “and probably ought to be locked up in one of those white jackets with the stylish long sleeves. But that doesn’t matter, ’cause we’re friends.”

“...logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.”

“...rational thoughts made out of insane components.”

“Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.”

“It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”

“This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.”

“So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.”

“If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone’s wallets.”

“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”

“And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust? Very nearly everyone, come to think of it...”

“V tomhle byli lidé opravdu zvláštní. Ukradnete sto tolarů a jste malý zlodějíček. Ukradnete statisíce a jste buď vláda, nebo hrdina.”

“Bees buzzed in the bean blossoms. And the sun beat down on the upturned shell of Om. There is also a hell for tortoises. He was too tired to waggle his That was all you could do, waggle your legs. And stick your head out as far as it would go and wave it about in the hope that you could lever yourself over.”

“Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.”

“There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!" But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.”

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

“Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything…”

“When he'd been small, people had said things like, "And what do you want to be, little man?" and he'd said, "I don’t know. What have you got?”

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

“It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad”

“History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.”

“Everything is a test.”

“Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.”

“Inside every lump of coal there's a diamond waiting to get out.”

“She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized (fossils were well known on the Discworld, great spiraled shells and badly constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadow of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.”

“For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.”

“Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist.”

“He shrugged. - They're just people - he said. - They're just doing what people do. Sir.Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile.- Of course, of course - he said. - You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad. Otherwise you'd think you're standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand.”

“Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.”

“He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba.”

“Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.”

“It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.”

“People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.”

“They sometimes forgot what happened if you let a pawn get all the way up the board.”

“Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

“I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD."Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?”

“The past needs to be remembered. If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going.”

“They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time.”

“I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”

“They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.”

“Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them - when she thought about them at all – as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.”

“... and all those frogs going 'Rabbit, rabbit'...""I think, sir, that it was 'Ribbit, ribbit'...""So, what goes 'Rabbit, rabbit'?""Rabbits, I think. All the time...”