Terry Pratchett

“The Librarian liked being best man. You were allowed to kiss bridesmaids, and they weren't allowed to run away.”

“He always says that,' muttered Vimes as the two men hurried down the stairs. 'He knows I don't like being married to a duchess.''I thought you and Lady Sybil-''Oh, being married to Sybil is fine, fine,' said Vimes hurriedly. 'It's just the duchess bit I don't like.”

“Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky secondhand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it.”

“There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.”

“Om helps those who help one another.”

“He'd missed dogs. Dogs added something that even people didn't, and one of the dogs was sitting by his feet, here in the darkness and the gentle rain. It wasn't bothered much about the rain or what might be out there on the unseen sea, but Mau was a warm body moving about in a sleeping world and might at any moment do something that called for runnung around and barking. Occasionally it looked up at him adoringly and made a slobbery gulping noise which possibly meant "Anything you say, boss!”

“It's All Officers, sir."They broke into a run. You always did for an All Officers. The people in trouble might well be you.”

“No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise?”

“Where's my daddy?Is that my daddy?It goes, "I fink, derefore I am. I fink." It is Sergeant Detritus the troll!That's not my daddy!”

“The dwarf bread was brought out for inspection. But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you'd rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.”

“Vimes' meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet very nagging suspicion that he'd only just escaped with his life.”

“Raising the flag and singing the anthem are, while somewhat suspicious, not in themselves acts of treason.”

“All witches who'd lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn't, the reason being that the words got in the way.”

“You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?”

“-Examinó la etiqueta-. ¿Chateau Maison? Chat-eau... Eso es extranjero para aguas de gato, sabes, pero supongo que sólo es su manera de decirlo, porque ya me he dado cuenta de que no es aguas de gato. Las auténticas aguas de gato tienen un sabor más seco.”

“-Pero tengan en cuenta -dijo Ponder- que los cementerios están llenos de gente que fue más valiente que sensata.”

“La cabaña de una bruja es un objeto arquitectónico muy preciso. Exactamente no es que se la construya, sino que se va acumulando a lo largo de los años conforme se van uniendo las distintas áreas de reparación, como un calcetín hecho enteramente de remiendos. La chimenea se retuerce como un sacacorchos. El techo de paja y cañizo es tan viejo que pequeños pero robustos árboles crecen en él, todos los suelos hacen pendiente, y de noche cruje como un velero en una tormenta. Si al menos dos paredes no están apuntaladas con alguna que otra viga, entonces no es una auténtica cabaña de bruja, sino meramente el hogar de una vieja medio chocha que lee las hojas del té y habla con su gato.”

“The Kraken stirs. And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.”

“Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.”

“That doesn't sound very reliable to me," said the druid nastily. "How can a book know what day it is? Paper can't count.”

“What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.”

“He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human—human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls …the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress.”

“Bee there Orr Bee A Rectangular Thyng”

“Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, "The mountain is, and is not." They would think, "The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana.”

“Quick, someone's coming! Look real!”

“He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.”

“She never sent the castle to sleep”, said Granny, “that’s just an old wife’s tale. She just stirred up time a little. It’s not as hard as people think, everyone does it all the time. It’s like rubber, is time, you can stretch it to suit yourself.”Magrat was about to say: That’s not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that’s its job. Then she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so quickly she hadn’t been aware they’d gone past at all.“But that’s just people’s perception, isn’t it?”“Oh yes”, said Granny, “of course it is, it all is, what difference does that make?”

“Even with nougat, you can have a perfect moment.”

“My personal theory is that he has a very firm grasp upon reality, it's simply not a reality the rest of us have ever met before.”

“It’s quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.”

“The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human's eye and get away with it.”

“His Greatness the King Pteppicymon XXVIII, Lord of the Heavens, Charioteer of the Wagon of the Sun, Steersman of the Barque of the Sun, Guardian of the Secret Knowledge, Lord of the Horizon, Keeper of the Way, the Flail of Mercy, the High Born One, the Never Dying King.”

“[...]And his head is on fire with new things[...]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever.”

“Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.”

“I've never really liked the Yanks. ... You can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football.”

“A horse's skull always looks scary, even if someone has put lipstick on it.”

“Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding to door when it is really coming up through the floorboards. Real dark forces... aren't dark. They're sort of gray, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the color out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no one wants to live and no one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes gray and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic...”

“Stanley always followed the rules. All sorts of things could go wrong if you didn't. So far he'd done 1:Upon Discovery of the Fire, Remain Calm.Now he'd come to 2: Shout 'Fire!' in a Loud, Clear Voice.'Fire!' he shouted, and then ticked off 2 with his pencil.Next was: 3: Endeavour to Extinguish Fire If Possible.Stanley went to the door and opened it. Flames and smoke billowed in. He stared at them for a moment, shook his head, and shut the door.Paragraph 4 said: If Trapped by Fire, Endeavour to Escape. Do Not Open Doors If Warm. Do Not Use Stairs If Burning. If No Exit Presents Itself Remain Calm and Await a) Rescue or b) Death.”

“Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.”

“If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.”

“Watering down the currency of expression, causing anything to mean whatever you want it to mean, until nothing is meant and nothing is precise.”

“What is magic?Then there is the witches' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on the age of the witch. Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn't know what the hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities, and could become any one of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty was inserted into the crack and twisted; that, if you really had to make someone's hat explode, all you needed to do was twist into that universe where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce off in different directions.Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers on. Everyone may be right, all at the same time. That's the thing about quantum.”

“It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.”

“There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.”

“Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.”

“Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon -- he'd run them all.”

“Si era straubriacato, ecco. Perché un mondo tutto distorto e sbagliato, come uno specchio deformante, tornava a fuoco soltanto se lo si guardava attraverso il fondo di una bottiglia.”

“DEAFNESS DOESN'T PREVENT COMPOSERS HEARING THE MUSIC. IT PREVENTS THEM HEARING THE DISTRACTIONS.”

“There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.”

“[...]all men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear[...]”