Terry Pratchett

“They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.”

“Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.”

“Where's the pleasure in bein' the winner if the loser ain't alive to know they've lost?”

“I heard this story once," she said, "where this bloke got locked up for years and years and he learned amazin' stuff about the universe and everythin' from another prisoner who was incredibly clever, and then he escaped and got his revenge.""What incredibly clever stuff do you know about the universe, Gytha Ogg?" said Granny."Bugger all," said Nanny cheerfully."Then we'd better bloody well escape right now.”

“It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed.""That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.”

“The figure stopped to cough long and hard, making a noise like a wall being hit repeatedly with a bag of rocks. Moist saw that it had a beard of the short bristled type that suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.”

“Possession of the box conferred a kind of power on the wielder--which was that anyone, confronted with the hypnotic glass eye, would submissively obey the most peremptory orders about stance and expression.”

“Actors had a habit of filling all the space around them.”

“Witches aren’t like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

“But I think you have a right to know what it is you’re not being told.”

“Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks gravitate to gravity.”

“The brain works fast when it thinks it’s about to be cut in half.”

“Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench.”

“His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much.”

“It didn't look like the kind of snow that whispers down gently in the pit of the night and in the morning turns the landscape into a glittering wonderland of uncommon and ethereal beauty. It looked like the kind of snow that intends to make the world as bloody cold as possible.”

“The universe was bad enough without people poking it.”

“There’s no point in believing in things that exist.”

“You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.”

“This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one.”

“The thing about late-night cookery was that it made sense at the time. It always had some logic behind it. It just wasn’t the kind of logic you’d use around midday.”

“Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”

“Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad.”

“It is not a good idea to spray finest brandy across the room, especially when your lighted cigar is in the way.”

“Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.”

“Things were simpler then. And also very, very stupid.”

“I cannot conceive not writing.”

“I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.”

“C'est marrant, les sourcils, songea-t-il. C'est une fois qu'ils sont partis qu'on les remarque vraiment.”

“The thing about witchcraft," said Mistress Weatherwax, "is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect”

“Steal five dollars and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero.”

“You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day."For some reason the books of etiquette that Daphne's grandmother had forced on her didn't quite deal with this. Of course, silly people would say to babies, "You're so sweet I could gobble you all up!" but that sort of nonsense seemed less funny when it was said by a man in war paint who owned more than one skull. Daphne, cursed with good manners, settled for "It's very kind of you to say so.”

“Funny, reely," he said. "You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know.”

“He moved on, in the centre of a widening circle. He wasn't an enemy, he was a nemesis.”

“There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”

“His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.”

“That was always the dream, wasn't it? 'I wish I'd known then what I know now'? But when you got older you found out that you NOW wasn't YOU then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.”

“He had a sword. There was that about him: when this man held a sword, it was clearly being held, and held by him. The eye was drawn to it. Even Jade would have been impressed.”

“Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery.”

“There were people who’d steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.”

“No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.”

“Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.”

“They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?”

“The year is round! The wheel of the world must spin! That is why up here they dance the Dark Morris, to balance it. They welcome the winter because of the new summer deep inside it!”

“Child. That was a terrible thing to say to anyone who was almost thirteen.”

“She sat silently in her rocking chair. Some people are good at talking, but Granny Weatherwax was good at silence. She could sit so quiet and still that she faded. You forgot she was there. The room became empty.Tiffany thought of it as the I’m-not-here spell, if it was a spell. She reasoned that everyone had something inside them that told the world theywere there. That was why you could often sense when someone was behind you, even if they were making no sound at all. You were receiving their I-am-here signal.Some people had a very strong one. They were the people who got served first in shops. Granny Weatherwax had an I-am-here signal that bounced off the mountains when she wanted it to; when she walked into a forest, all the wolves and bears ran out the other side. She could turn it off, too. She was doing that now. Tiffany was having to concentrate to see her. Most of her mind was telling her that there was no one there at all.”

“It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.”

“You’d better tell me what you know, toad,” said Tiffany. “Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.”“Another world is colliding with this one,” said the toad. “There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.”“Why?”“There’s no one to stop them.”There was silence for a moment.“There’s me,” said Tiffany.”

“You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.”

“. . . you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry King was all about business.”

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