Discworld/Quotes

Terry Pratchett is very quotable. This page is under construction and mostly stolen from the Pratchett Quote File.

Guards! Guards!
""[...] a number of offences of murder by means of a blunt instrument, to whit, a dragon, and many further offences of generalized abetting [...]""

""Have another drink, not-Corporal Nobby?" said Sergeant Colon unsteadily. "I do not mind if I do, not-Sgt Colon," said Nobby."

- The joys of working undercover

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."

"There was a thoughtful pause in the conversation as the assembled Brethren mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side."

"All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional."

"All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee."

"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.""

"It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military manoeuvres, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of."

"Vetinari:You think there are the good people and the bad people. You are wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."

"Lady Ramkin's bosom rose and fell like an empire."

"Vimes: It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing."

"The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality."

"A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it."

"Thunder rolled. It rolled a six."

""Right, you bastards, you're... you're geography!""

"The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."

"You have the effrontery to be squeamish. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape -- we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."

Men at Arms
"If the Creator had said, "Let there be light" in Ankh-Morpork, he'd have gotten no further because of all the people saying "What colour?""

"From the back, Vetinari looked like a carnivorous flamingo."

"Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days, but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law."

"The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other."

"Carrot was two metres tall but he'd been brought up as a dwarf, and then further up as a human."

""Young Edward thinks that there is no lake of blood too big to wade through to put a rightful king on a throne, no deed too base in defence of a crown. A romantic, in fact.""

"The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving."

"He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no one knew where he kept it."

- On Nobby.

"Gaspode the Wonder Dog: Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage."

"The river Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse."

"The Alchemist's Guild is opposite the Gambler's Guild. Usually. Sometimes it's above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it."

"Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits."

"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."

"Being a werewolf meant having the dexterity and jaw power to instantly rip out a man's jugular. It was a trick of her father's that had always annoyed her mother, especially when he did it just before meals."

""It's got three keyboards and a hundred extra knobs, including twelve with '?' on them.""

- The Unseen University Organ, as designed by B. S. Johnson

"The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orang-utan/Human Dictionary. He'd been working on it for three months. It wasn't easy. He'd got as far as "Oook"."

""It could be a torture chamber or a dungeon or a hideous pit or anything!" "It's just a student's bedroom, sergeant." "You see?""

"The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it."

- Bloody Stupid Johnson, for all your landscaping needs.

"He was a good copper. That had got said at every guard funeral Vimes had ever attended. It'd probably be said even at Corporal Nobbs' funeral, although everyone would have their fingers crossed behind their backs. It was what you had to say."

Feet of Clay
""Bingeley bingeley beep!""

"He hated the very idea of the world being divided into the shaved and the shavers. Or those who wore the shiny boots and those who cleaned the mud off them. Every time he saw Willikins the butler fold his, Vimes's, clothes, he suppressed a terrible urge to kick the butler's shiny backside as an affront to the dignity of man."

"Slab: Jus' say "AarrghaarrghpleeassennononoUGH""

- Detritus' war on drugs

"And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions."

"There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell."

"Vimes: Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk."

"You never ever volunteered. Not even if a sergeant stood there and said, "We need someone to drink alcohol, bottles of, and make love, passionate, to women, for the use of." There was always a snag. If a choir of angels asked for volunteers for Paradise to step forward, Nobby knew enough to take one smart pace to the rear."

"Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"

"Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips."

"Vetinari to Vimes: In all, I've had seventeen demands for your badge. Some want parts of your body attached. Why did you have to upset everybody?"

"It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to "serve the community" by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways."

"It was hard enough to kill a vampire. You could stake them down and turn them into dust and ten years later someone drops a drop of blood in the wrong place and guess who's back? They returned more times than raw broccoli."

Jingo
"Vimes's grin was as funny as the one that moves very fast towards drowning men. And has a fin on top."

""Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.""

"She sighed again. She was familiar with the syndrome. They said they wanted a soulmate and helpmeet but sooner or later the list would include a skin like silk and a chest fit for a herd of cows."

"One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."

"'Look, sir, I know Angua. She's not the useless type. She doesn't stand there and scream helplessly. She makes other people do that.'"

""Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.""

""Veni, vici... Vetinari.""

"And there was nothing finer than a wizard dressed up formally, until someone could find a way of inflating a Bird of Paradise, possibly by using an elastic band and some kind of gas."

""One o'clock pee em! Hello, Insert Name Here!""

"He had the look of a lawn mower just after the grass had organised a workers' collective. There was a definite suggestion that, deep inside, he knew this was not really happening. It could not be happening because this sort of thing did not happen. Any contradictory evidence could be safely ignored."

"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, 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."

The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud! and Snuff

 * The Fifth Elephant/Quotes
 * Night Watch/Quotes
 * Thud!/Quotes
 * Snuff/Quotes

Equal Rites
"If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split-window Morris Minor."

""While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe." Treatle nodded. "I hadn't looked at it like that," he said, "But you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance.""

- Discworld scientists at work

"They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things."

- Discworld scientists at work

"They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair."

""They say there's dwarf mines under the Ramtops," she said inconsequentially. "My, but them little buggers is in for a surprise.""

- Granny reflects on Esk's methods of lighting a fire.

"For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks."

Wyrd Sisters
"As the cauldron bubbled, an eldritch voice shrieked, "When shall we three meet again?" Another voice said, in far more ordinary tones, "Well, I can do next Tuesday.""

"The calender of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out."

"The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo."

""'Tis not right, a woman going into such places by herself." Granny nodded. She thoroughly approved of such sentiments so long as there was, of course, no suggestion that they applied to her."

Witches Abroad

 * Witches Abroad/Quotes

Lords and Ladies
"The Librarian looked out at the jolting scenery. He was sulking. This had a lot to do with the new bright collar around his neck with the word "PONGO" on it. Someone was going to suffer for this."

""Kneel and deliver!""

- Casanunda, the world's smallest lover turns highwaydwarf

"Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people."

"Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful."

"Death grinned hopefully."

"Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare."

"Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu-- was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it."

"The thing about iron is that you generally don't have to think fast in dealing with it."

"Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck."

"The chieftain had been turned into a pumpkin although, in accordance with the rules of universal humour, he still had his hat on."

"She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley."

- About Nanny Ogg

"In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious."

"The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking."

""Hah, I can just see a real playsmith putting donkeys in a play!""

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, especially simian ones. They are not all that subtle."

"Magrat: Go ahead, bake my quiche."

"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded."

- Pterry explains the Big Bang

"Remember, A Dragon is For Life, Not Just for Hogswatchnight"

- Motto of The Sunshine Home for Sick Dragons in Morphic Street, Please Leave Donations of Coal by Side Door.

"There have, in the course of decadent history, been many large wigs, often with build-in gewgaws to stop people having to look at boring hair all the time. There had been ones big enough to contain pet mice or clockwork ornaments. Mme Cupidor, mistress of Mad King Soup II, had one with a bird cage in it, but on special state occasions wore one containing a perpetual calendar, a floral clock and a take-away linguini shop."

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

"No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles]."

"And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork."

"It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ (Lit.: 'Thing-ies') or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five 'flavours', known as 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'sex appeal' and 'peppermint'."

"A heap of discarded garments by the bed suggested that Verence had mastered the art of hanging up clothes as practised by half the population of the world, and that he had equally had difficulty with the complex topological manoeuvres necessary to turn the socks the right way out."

"Oh, gods. He'd always slept in front of the door of his master. And now he was king, he slept in front of the door to his kingdom."

"Chain-mail isn't much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn't when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes."

"It's not enough to be able to pick up a sword. You have to know which end to poke into the enemy."

"The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select."

Maskerade
"The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille."

"Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha! BEWARE!!!!! Yrs sincerely The Opera Ghost"

"Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed to even think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat."

"People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people."

"He had a unique stride: it looked as though his body was being dragged forward and his legs had to flail around underneath it, landing wherever they could find room. It wasn't so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely postponed."

"She'd even given herself a middle initial - X - which stood for "someone who has a cool and exciting middle initial"."

""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.""

"Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows."

""...my father is the Emperor of Klatch and my mother is a small tray of raspberry puddings.""

"Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys."

"A day ago the future had looked aching and desolate, and now it looked full of surprises and terror and bad things happening to people... If she had anything to do with it anyway."

"It was done far more often than the audiences ever realized -- when singers had a sore throat, or had completely dried, or had turned up so drunk they could barely stand, or, in one notorious instance many years previously, had died in the interval and subsequently sung their famous aria by means of a broom-handle stuck up their back and their jaw operated with a piece of string."

"After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way."

""Well, basically there are two sorts of Opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.""

"The pre-luncheon drinks were going quite well, Mr Bucket thought. Everyone was making polite conversation and absolutely no one had been killed up to the present moment."

"Nanny could get a statue to cry on her shoulder and say what it really thought about pigeons."

"Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harrassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room."

"It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end."

Carpe Jugulum

 * Carpe Jugulum/Quotes

The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Sourcery

 * The Colour of Magic/Quotes
 * The Light Fantastic/Quotes
 * Sourcery/Quotes

Eric
"No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops."

"Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, "Where's my clean socks?", no-one answers."

"It was true about the time measurement as well. The Tezumen had realized long ago that everything was steadily getting worse and, having a terrible little-mindedness, had developed a complex system to keep track of how much worse each succeeding day was."

""There's a door." "Where does it go?" "It stays where it is, I think.""

"The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so."

""So we're surrounded by absolutely nothing. There's a word for it. It's what you get when there's nothing left and everything's been used up." "Yes. I think it's called the bill.""

""What're quantum mechanics?" "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.""

"The librarian was, ex officio, a member of the college council. No-one had been able to find any rule about orang-utans being barred, although they had surreptitiously looked very hard for one."

"There had been some desultory talk about putting up a statue to Rincewind but, by the curious alchemy that tends to apply in these sensitive issues, this quickly became a plaque, then a note on the Roll of Honour, and finally a motion of censure for being improperly dressed."

- Unseen University politics at work

"Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake."

- Why summoning demons is a Bad Idea

"The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight."

"The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking."

"The sergeant put on the poker face which has been handed down from NCO to NCO ever since one protoamphibian told another, lower ranking protoamphibian to muster a squad of newts and Take That Beach."

"Eric: "What shall I do?" Rincewind: "Well, if you see anything crawl out of the sea and try to breathe, you could try telling it not to bother.""

- At the Beginning of Time

""Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind.""

"The Supreme Life President of Hell wrote: "What business are we in???" He thought for a bit, and then carefully wrote, underneath: "We are in the damnation business!!!""

Interesting Times
"Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four."

"Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous."

"++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start."

""Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad.""

"Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like "What is my purpose in life?" very quickly lacked both."

""Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum.""

"The Emperor had all the qualifications for a corpse except, as it were, the most vital one."

"Rincewind: I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting "Forward, brave comrades!" you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!"

"Many an ancient lord's last words had been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh.""

"Inexperienced travellers might think that 'Aargh!' is universal, but in Betrobi it means 'highly enjoyable' and' in Howondaland it means, variously, 'I would like to eat your foot', 'Your wife is a big hippo' and 'Hello, Thinks Mr Purple Cat.' One particular tribe has a fearsome reputation for cruelty merely because prisoners appear, to them, to be shouting 'Quick! Extra boiling oil!"

The Last Continent
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'."

"They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don't have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past."

"Wasn't it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?"

"Reading the invisible writings was a delicate and meticulous job, suited to the kind of temperament that follows Grand Prix Continental Drift and keeps bonsai mountains as a hobby or even drives a Volvo."

"'He called me in and asked me what I did, exactly. Have you ever heard of such a thing? What sort of question is that? This is auniversity!'"

"Don't go digging things up in case they won't let you bury them again."

"In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers."

"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 was about."

"Rincewind's hourglass looked like something created by a glassblower who'd had the hiccups in a time machine. According to the amount of actual sand it contained – and Death was pretty good at making this kind of estimate – he should have died long ago."

"Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot."

"This isn't magic. It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they've always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases,even The Mu Kau Pi Caper). Sometimes a hammer and sickle turn up on the cover. This is probably caused by sunspot activity, since they are invariably the wrong way round. It's just as well for the Librarian that he sneezed when he did, or he might have ended up a thousand pages thick and crammed with weapons specifications."

"'I thought I was just naturally lucky,' said Rincewind. He thought about what he'd just said. 'I must have been crazy.'"

"'All bastards are bastards, but some bastards is bastards.'"

"Discworld constellations changed frequently as the world moved through the void, which meant that astrology was cutting-edge research rather than, as elsewhere, a clever way of avoiding a proper job."

"'Haven't you noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?' 'Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that, too. That's the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.' 'Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.' 'Yes, but it's the important one.'"

"Ponder had been that kind of child. He still had all the pieces for every game he'd ever been given. Ponder had been the kind of boy who carefully reads the label on every Hogswatch present before opening it, and notes down in a small book, who it is from, and has all the thank-you letters written by teatime. His parents had been impressed even then, realizing that they had given birth to a child who would achieve great things or, perhaps, be hunted down by a righteous citizenry by the time he was ten."

"Even now, if he closed his eyes, he could still see the God of Evolution beaming so happily as the cockroach stirred."

"Was it just possible that someone had invented a regional speciality you could eat?"

"'But my suspicions were first aroused when the Bursar developed planets.' There were two of them, orbiting his head at a height of a few inches. As was so often the case with magical phenomena, they possessed virtual unreality and passed unscathed through him and one another. They were slightly transparent."

"There are platonic burgers made of beef instead of cow lips and hooves. There are fish 'n' chips where the fish is more than just a white goo lurking at the bottom of a batter casing and you can't use the chips to shave with. There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don't apply mustard because that would spoil the taste. It's just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort and seek it out. It's as if Machiavelli had written a cookery book. Even so, there is no excuse for putting pineapple on pizza."

"'Why did he have to go to prison?' 'We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?' 'Why?' 'It saves time.'"

"It was obvious that some time after the brewery had been closed, but before people had got around to securely locking every entrance, the cellars had been employed by young people as such places are when you live with your parents, the house is too small, and no one has got around to inventing the motorcar."

"They cancelled the regatta. A river full of water made a mockery of the whole idea."

Mort

 * Mort/Quotes

Reaper Man
"No one was avoiding him, it was just that an apparent random Brownian motion was gently moving everyone away."

"People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory."

"He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat."

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."

"It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom."

"What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?"

"One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don’t want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people? One said, Got a crush on them, sort of thing?"

"Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone."

"Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed."

""Windle!” he said. “We thought you were dead!” He had to admit that it wasn’t a very good line. You didn’t put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they’ve got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour."

"It took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place."

"The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “I haven’t felt like this since Mrs. Cake was one of my flock.” Archchancellor Ridcully: “Mrs. Cake? What’s a Mrs. Cake?” The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “You have . . . ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?” Archchancellor Ridcully: “Yes.” The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “We have someone called Mrs. Cake.”"

"It was another day. Cyril the cockerel stirred on his perch. The chalked words glowed in the half light. He concentrated. He took a deep breath. “Dock-a-loodle-fod!” Now that the memory problem was solved, there was only the dyslexia to worry about."

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

"Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason."

"No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly-wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids."

"Traditionally, only two people ever went into the innermost sanctuary. They were the High Priest and the other priest who wasn’t High. They had been there for years, and took turns at being the high one."

"No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."

"On the fabled hidden continent of Xxxx, somewhere near the rim, there is a lost colony of wizards who wear corks around their pointy hats and live on nothing but prawns."

""You know," said Windle, "it's a wonderful afterlife.""

""Being needed is important.

"I don't know. How should I know? Because we're all in this together, I suppose. Because we don't leave our people in there. Because you're a long time dead. Because anything is better than being alone. Because humans are human.""

Soul Music
"Words have always had the power to change the world. Be Careful What You Wish For. You never know who will be listening. Or what, for that matter."

"Miss Eulalie Butts and her colleague Miss Delcross had founded the College on the astonishing idea that, since gels had nothing much to do until someone married them, they may as well occupy themselves by learning things."

"Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book."

"Traditionally, the ways of forgetting include joining the Klatchian Foreign Legion, drinking the waters of some magical river, no one knows where it is, and imbibing vast amounts of alcohol."

"Glod knew a guitar when he saw one. They were supposed to be shaped like a woman, but this was only the case if you thought a woman had no legs, a long neck, and too many ears."

"And they were such sad, wet girls. They always let things happen to them, without making any effort. They just went around saying things like “My goodness me,” when it was obvious that any sensible human being could soon get the place properly organized."

"It didn’t have a name. Animals don’t normally bother with them. The wizard who thought he owned him called him Quoth, but that was only because he didn’t have a sense of humor and, like most people without a sense of humor, prided himself on the sense of humor he hadn’t, in fact, got."

"There is a type of girl who, while incapable of cleaning her bedroom even at knife point, will fight for the privilege of being allowed to spend the day shoveling manure in a stable."

"There was a brass plate screwed on the wall beside the door. It said: “C V Cheesewaller, DM (Unseen), B. Thau, B.F.” It was the first time Susan had ever heard metal speak."

"Colon: “What do you mean, what’s his first name?” Nobby: “What’s his first name?” Colon: “He’s Death. Death. That’s his whole name. I mean…what do you mean?…you mean like…Keith Death?”"

"The D’regs were at war with everyone, including one another, and having considerable fun because the D’reg word for “stranger” was the same as for “target”."

"“He can’t stop us. We’re on a mission from Glod.”"

"They’d assumed that insulating her from the fluffy edges of the world was the safest thing to do. In the circumstances, this was like not telling people about self-defense so that no one would ever attack them."

"The Reader had a theory that all the really good books in any building — at least, all the really funny ones — gravitate to a pile in the privy but no one ever has time to read all of them, or even knows how they came to be there. His research was causing extreme constipation and a queue outside the door every morning."

"Glod:“In my experience, what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.” Buddy: “And famous." Glod: “Famous I don’t know about. It’s hard to be famous and alive. I just want to play music every day and hear someone say, ‘Thanks, that was great, here is some money, same time tomorrow, okay?’”"

"Ponder looked absolutely crestfallen. There are some people born with the instinctive feeling that the universe is solvable."

"Bee There Orr Bee A Rectangular Thyng They Are Totallye Unable To Bee Seene! And A Longe Way Oute!"

"There is something very sad about an empty dressing room. It’s like a discarded pair of underpants, which it resembles in a number of respects. It’s seen a lot of activity. It may even have witnessed excitement and a whole gamut of human passions. And now there’s nothing much left but a faint smell."

"“Well, we think it might be able to do quite complicated math. If we can get enough bugs in it.”"

"Wizards were rumored to be wise—in fact, that’s where the word came from*."

- *From the Old wys-ars, lit: one who, at bottom, is very smart.

"Going into the Mended Drum and calling yourself Vincent the Invulnerable was clearly suicide by Ankh-Morpork standards."

"“Maybe dey don’t want der hotels redecorated. I said it was a mistake, orange curtains with yellow wallpaper.”"

"He didn’t have henchmen. Most trolls weren’t clever enough to hench."

"Proper lawn maintenance could be a real problem when things from another dimension were allowed to slither over it."

"She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner, and was tall in every respect except height. Amazingly, she’d apparently been able to keep this a secret from people."

Hogfather
"Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs."

- Susan Sto Helit

"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."

"She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella."

"This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr. Clever Dick in these parts...""

""Did you check the list?""

""That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?""

"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time."

"Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words."

"We took pity on him because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that."

- Lord Downey reflects on Mister Teatime

"It's a sad and terrible thing that high-born folk really have thought that the servants would be totally fooled if spirits were put into decanters that were cunningly labelled backwards. And also throughout history the more politically conscious butler has taken it on trust, and with rather more justification, that his employers will not notice if the whisky is topped up with eniru."

"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head."

"+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++"

""Millennium hand and shrimp.""

""Don't worry, I'm on your side. A violent death is the last thing that will happen to you.""

- Mister Teatime is very reassuring.

Thief of Time

 * Thief of Time/Quotes

Tiffany Aching and The Wee Free Men

 * The Wee Free Men/Quotes
 * A Hat Full of Sky/Quotes
 * Wintersmith/Quotes
 * I Shall Wear Midnight/Quotes
 * The Shepherd's Crown/Quotes

Moist von Lipwig

 * Going Postal (Discworld)/Quotes
 * Making Money/Quotes
 * Raising Steam/Quotes

Pyramids
"What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: "Why is it so dark in here?""

"All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed."

"The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one."

"Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the "Marie Celeste", and the chuck keys for electric drills."

"There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification."

Moving Pictures
"The Librarian had seen many weird things in his time, but that had to be the 57th strangest."

""Woof bloody woof.""

- Gaspode the Wonder Dog

"It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbours * preferred* explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you."

"The Archchancellor's most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar's point of view, without reading them first."

"By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold."

""If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.""

- On popcorn

"Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact."

"And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything."

""The thing is that Mr. Dibbler can even sell sausages to people who have bought them off him before.""

""Why's it called Ming?" said the Archchancellor, on cue. The Bursar tapped the pot. It went ming."

"Azhural raised his staff. "It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork," he said. "We've got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon's about to break and we're wearing... we're wearing... sort of things, like glass, only dark... dark glass things on our eyes...""

"People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes."

""It looks worse than you can imagine!" "I can imagine some pretty bad things!" "That's why I said worse!""

""Woof. In tones of low menace.""

""There's nothin' wrong with bein' a son of a bitch.""

""I can explain it in Dog, but you only listen in Human.""

""Well, 'scuse me. I was jus' tryin' to save the world.""

""If gharstely creatures from before the Dawna Time starts wavin' at you from under your bed, jus' you don't come complainin' to me.""

""Messin' around with girls in thrall to Creatures from the Void never works out, take my word for it.""

""Can't sing. Can't dance. Can handle a sword a little.""

""Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?" said Dibbler. "He says he can't," said Victor. Dibbler hesitated. "Well," he said, "I suppose he should know.""

"In retrospect, Victor was always a little unclear about those next few minutes. That's the way it goes. The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die."

Small Gods
""Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.""

""It's a god-eat-god world.""

""You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.""

"His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.""

"One day, a tortoise will learn how to fly."

"History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles."

"And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!""

"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."

""There's very good eating on one of these, you know.""

""Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.""

"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."

""Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words.""

"Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be."

"Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum."

", he said,"

"Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off."

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

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

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

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned."

"Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time."

"When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror."

""What's a philosopher ?" said Brutha. "Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting.""

""Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis. "So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water.""

""He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.""

""You're not one of us." "I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine.""

"Simony's eyes gleamed with the gleam of a man who had seen the future and found it covered with armour plating."

""All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private.""

"When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary."

""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.""

""Why do you bother with him? He's had thousands of people killed!" "Yes, but perhaps he thought that you wanted it.""

"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god)."

"The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish."

""He's muffed it," said Simony. "He could have done anything with them. And he just told them the facts. You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.""

""You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.""

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

""All the other prophets came back with commandments!" "Where'd they get them?" "I ... suppose they made them up." "You get them from the same place.""

"Brutha tried to nod, and thought: I'm on everyone's side. It'd be nice if, just for once, someone was on mine."

"Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection."

"Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem."

""We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies. Now we've got a truth to die for!" "No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.""

""Yes. Yes, of course." Death nodded., he said,"

""I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.""

""I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts," said Brutha. "That way, everyone's happy.""

""That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, 'Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.'""

""He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you'd go mad.""

The Truth, The Last Hero, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Monstrous Regiment, and Unseen Academicals

 * The Truth/Quotes
 * The Last Hero/Quotes
 * The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents/Quotes
 * Monstrous Regiment/Quotes
 * Unseen Academicals/Quotes

Games
""As far as leaders go, the only reason I'd follow him into battle, is out of curiosity.""

""A swamp dragon if i'm not mistaken. I though these things were filled with explosive gas, (the carcass explodes) oh right!"

"Rincewind Excuse me sir. Could you get me a tome called 'featherwinkle's concise compedium of dragons' lairs'? Librarian ook ook eek ook. (both engage in a conversation of ape talk) Rincewind Well nevermind I'll come back later. Librarian ook eek ook? Rincewind Yes i've gibbon up. no monkey, ape ... oh damn! (the librarian hits him over the head)"

""Ugh It's horrible... hang on it's me! rather chap ain't he?"