Terry Pratchett Quotes

756 Sourced Quotes

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

Terry Pratchett
The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn't worked.

Terry Pratchett
Theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They explain the observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong.

Terry Pratchett
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

Terry Pratchett
History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it

Terry Pratchett
Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

Terry Pratchett
London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.

Terry Pratchett
And we don't often get any wading birds in the River Ankh, mainly because the pollution would eat their legs away and anyway, it's easier for them to walk on the surface.

Terry Pratchett
This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.

Terry Pratchett
The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case...

Terry Pratchett
The thing with crowns is, it isn't the putting them on that's the problem, it's the taking them off.

Terry Pratchett
SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

Terry Pratchett
People are bound to get excited when they see a ten-million-ton starship trying to fly down the street.

Terry Pratchett
I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

Terry Pratchett
Aliens don't get stuck in air ducts. It's practically a well-known fact.

Terry Pratchett
Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving

Terry Pratchett
Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

Terry Pratchett
History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

Terry Pratchett
The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.

Terry Pratchett
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

Terry Pratchett
Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk [...]

Terry Pratchett
Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.

Terry Pratchett
Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

Terry Pratchett
It doesn't matter how you live and die, it's how the bards wrote it down.

Terry Pratchett
Behind him the Master of Ceremonies cleared his throat. His eyes took on a distant, glazed look.The Stealer of Souls, he said in the faraway voice of one whose ears aren't hearing what his mouth is saying, Defeater of Empires, Swallower of Oceans, Thief of Years, The Ultimate Reality, Harvester of Mankind, the-ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT. I CAN SEE MYSELF IN.

Terry Pratchett
Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be

Terry Pratchett
He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically

Terry Pratchett
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedne ss.

Terry Pratchett
When your name is really and truly Percy Blakeney, pronounced 'Black-knee', and you still have bad acne in your twenties, you accept Pimple as a nickname and are grateful that it wasn't anything worse.

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

Terry Pratchett