Terry Pratchett

“He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armor shouting "All the Gods are bastards!”

“That's No'-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock, mistress,' said Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock. 'Ye were one jock short,' he added helpfully.”

“We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it.”

“Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can.People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way.”

“They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Just because I'm employing an Igor and working in a cellar doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman, ha ha ha!”

“It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.”

“He felt as if he had been shipwrecked on the Titanic, but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania.”

“It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.”

“A young man of godlilke proportions* was standing in the doorway.* The better class of gods, anyway. Not the ones with the tentacles, obviously.”

“I'm sure you won't dream of trying to escape from your obligations by fleeing the city...''I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord.''Indeed? Then if I were you I'd sue my face for slander.”

“Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.”

“Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.”

“Granny Weatherwax was a witch. That was quite acceptable in the Ramtops, and no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.”

“Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight!”

“It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.”

“Every step is a first step if it's a step in the right direction.”

“If you have let pride get the better of you, then you have already lost, but if you grab pride by the scruff of the neck and ride it like a stallion, then you may have already won.”

“Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.”

“The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates.”

“Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.”

“We (people) only remembered that elves sang. But we forgot what they sang about.”

“The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantate and Fugue for someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals.”

“And there was nothing you could do about a woman like that. She just turned herself into a hammer and you ran right into her.”

“Some people believe that when you die, you cross the River of Death and have to pay the ferryman. People don’t seem to worry about that these days. Perhaps there’s a bridge now.”

“Charity ain't giving people what you wants to give, it's giving people what they need to get.”

“First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.”

“Always face what you fear. Have just enough money, never too much, and some string. Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your responsibility. Witches deal with things. Never stand between two mirrors. Never cackle. Do what you must do. Never lie, but you don’t always have to be honest. Never wish. Especially don’t wish upon a star, which is astronomically stupid. Open your eyes, and then open your eyes again.”

“There is a phrase "neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring." This thing was all of them, plus some other bits of beasts unknown to science or nightmare or even kebab. There was certainly some red, and a lot of flapping, and Nutt was sure he caught a glimpse of an enormous sandal...”

“He got down easily by dropping uncontrollably from branch to branch until he landed on his head in a pile of pine needles, where he lay gasping for breath and wishing he'd been a better person.”

“They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever.”

“The path to wisdom does, in fact, begin with a single step. Where people go wrong is in ignoring all the thousands of other steps that come after it. They make the single step of deciding to become one with the universe and for some reason forget to take the logical next step of living for seventy years on a mountain and a daily bowl of rice and yak butter tea that would give it any meaning. While evidence says that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they're probably all on first steps.”

“Shoes, men, coffins; never accept the first one you see.”

“WHERE'S MY COW? ARE YOU MY COW? ”

“That's what I don't like about magic. It does everything by magic.”

“Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them.”

“In a distant forest a wolf howled, felt embarrassed when no one joined in, and stopped.”

“I dinna trust him," said Slightly Mad Angus. "He reads books an' such.”

“Rincewind trudged back up the beach. "The trouble is," he said, "is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.”

“He was trying to conjure up a succubus." It should be impossible to leer when all you've got is a beak, but the parrot managed it. "That's a female demon what comes in the night and makes mad passionate wossn-""I've heard of them," said Rincewind. "Bloody dangerous things."The parrot put its head on one side. "It never worked. All he ever got was a neuralger.""What's that?""It's a demon that comes and has a headache at you.”

“It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.”

“We sleepwalk through our lives, because how could we live if we were always this awake?”

“Listen very carefully... listen to everyone and don't say much and think about what they say and how they say it and watch their eyes... it becomes like a big jigsaw, but you're the only one who can see all the pieces. You'll know what they want you to know, and what they don't want you to know, and even what they think no one knows.”

“No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen...”

“BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT, IS THAT THE IDEA?“That’s about the size of it, master. A good god line, that. Don’t give ’em too much and tell ’em to be happy with it. Jam tomorrow, see.”THIS IS WRONG. Death hesitated. I MEAN…IT’S RIGHT TO BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT. BUT YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE SOMETHING TO BE HAPPY ABOUT HAVING. THERE’S NO POINT IN BEING HAPPY ABOUT HAVING NOTHING.”

“... the food was good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone.”

“Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.”

“Do you need an excuse to have a war? I mean, who for? Can't you just say "You got lots of cash and land, but I've got a big sword, so divvy up right now, chop chop.”

“People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“Existují takové věci jako jedlé... ne, delikátní pirohy v polévce, hrášky dokonale uvařené, rajská omáčka pikantní ve své chuťové plnosti a masová náplň z oněchčástí zvířat, které by se daly většinou i pojmenovat. Jsou platonické burgery vyrobené z hovězího a ne z volské tlamy a kopyt. Jsou jisté obchody, kde mají smažené filé s pomfrity, kdy filé je ryba a ne jen bílá břečka v rakvičce ze smažené strouhanky a pomfrity jsou k jídlu a nedají se použít k holení. Jsou párky v rohlíku, kdy mají párky s masem společnou nejen barvu a jejich šťastní konzumenti si na ně nedávají hořčici, aby nepokazili tu chuť. Důležité však je, že se lidé dají naučit na to, aby dávali přednost občerstvení toho prvního typu a vyhledávali je. Je to, jako kdyby Machiavelli napsal kuchařku. Ale ať už se mají věci jakkoliv, neexistuje omluva pro nikoho, kdo dá na pizzu ananas.”