Terry Pratchett

“The man gave Dodger a cursory glance that had quite a lot of curse in it.”

“Not much call for a barbarian hairdresser, I expect,' said Rincewind. 'I mean, no-one wants a shampoo-and-beheading.”

“I imagine that fish have no word for water.”

“Trouble is always easy to find when you have enough people looking for it.”

“You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you.”

“People like that don't need a reason apart from "because I can". They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.”

“Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available.”

“Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.”

“Carrot started to clap.It wasn't the clap used by middlings to encourage underlings to applaud overlings. It had genuine enthusiasm behind it which was, somehow, worse.”

“It was said that [Vetinari] would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city*... [Footnote] And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.”

“But we don't do things like that!" said Vimes. "You can't go around arresting the Thieves' Guild. I mean, we'd be at it all day!”

“When you break rules, break 'em good and hard”

“Believe it. That was the way. Never stop believing. Fool the eye, fool the brain.”

“They weren't looking at him as if he was their only hope. They were looking at him as if he was their Certainty.”

“A philosopher might have deplored this lack of mental ambition, but only if he was really certain about where his next meal was coming from.In fact Lancre's position and climate bred a hard-headed and straightforward people who often excelled in the world down below. it had supplied the planins with many of their greatest wizards and witches and, once again, the philospher might have marveled that such a four-square people could give the world so many successful magical practitioners, being quite unaware that only those with their feet on rock can build castles in the air.”

“It was impossible for him to get bored. He just didn't have the imagination.”

“There’s lots of people will help you with alcohol business, but there’s no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, ‘My name is Sam Vimes and I’m a really suspicious bastard.”

“There was something about the eyes. It wasn’t the shape or the color. The was no evil glint. But there was…… a look. It was such a look that a microbe might encounter if it could see up from the bottom end of the microscope. It said: You are nothing. It said: You are flawed, you have no value. It said: You are animal. It said: Perhaps you may be a pet, or perhaps you may be a quarry. It said: And the choice is not yours.”

“You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.”

“Sometimes you had to take a look at yourself and then look away.”

“Young Sam looked solemn for a moment and then said, "I think I'll let Mr. Whistle do the being scared and then it won't bother me.”

“Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter", don't stop to pack.”

“Like sheep which, having been driven to a pasture, can now spread out at their leisure, the clouds began to drift. Afternoon sunlight sliced through into the still waters. The boomerang hung in the sky, and the boy thought he would have to find a new word for the way the colours glowed. In the meantime, he looked down at the water and tried out the word he'd been taught by his grandfather, who'd been taught it by his grandfather, and which had been kept for thousands of years for when it would been needed. It meant the smell after rain. It had, he thought, been well worth waiting for.”

“This is Masher,' said Feeney. 'His father was a wild boar, his mother was surprised.”

“But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions.”

“Do unto others before they do unto you.”

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”

“In some parts of the city, curiosity didn't just kill the cat, it threw it in the river with lead weights tied to its feet.”

“Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.This proves two things:Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.Secondly, the Earth's a Libra.”

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

“THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.”

“Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom.”

“The Assassin moved quietly from roof to roof until he was well away from the excitement around the Watch House. His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.”

“Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.”

“Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.”

“The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.”

“REMIND ME AGAIN, he said, HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE.”

“Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey.”

“Bill Door found a piece of chalk in the farm's old smithy, located a piece of board among the debris, and wrote very carefully for some time. Then he wedged the board in front of the henhouse and pointed Cyril toward it.THIS YOU WILL READ, he said.Cyril peered myopically at the "Cock-A Doodle-Doo" in heavy gothic script. Somewhere in his tiny mad chicken mind a very distinct and chilly understanding formed that he'd better learn to read very, very quickly.”

“I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.”

“That's the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It's got no soul, sir, no heart.”

“He felt eyes suddenly upon him because marital telepathy is a terrible thing”

“Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.”

“The demon coughed nervously. Demons do not breathe; however, every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life. And this was one of them as far as the demon was concerned.”

“She couldn't demand that Mrs. Proust get off the bed; it wasn't her bed. It wasn't her castle. She smiled. In fact it really wasn't her problem. How nice to find a problem that wasn't yours.”

“When it came down to it and the life-or-death decision had to be made, then it was made by you, because you were the witch. And sometimes it wasn't a decision between a good thing or a bad thing, but a decision between to bad things: no right choices, just... choices.”

“A man of power and responsibility nevertheless needs somebody to tell him when he is being a bloody fool.”

“Witches knew that mysterious omens were around all the time. The world was always very nearly drowning in mysterious omens. You just had to pick the one that was convenient.”

“There were really only four kind of people in the world: men and women and wizards and witches.”

“Drinks like this tend to get called Traffic Lights or Rainbow's Revenge or, in places where truth is more highly valued, Hello and Good-Bye, Mr. Brain Cell.”