Terry Pratchett Quotes

756 Sourced Quotes

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

Terry Pratchett
Currently there's five machines permanently networked here. They all contain the serious core stuff. A couple of the machines are pensioned off 486s, with little other value now. Plus there's two Jaz drives in the building and the portable also carries a fair amount of stuff. Plus every Friday a man comes around and carves all the new stuff onto stone slabs and buries them in the garden... I think I'm okay.

Terry Pratchett
Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories.

Terry Pratchett
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett
Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.

Terry Pratchett
He was currently wondering vaguely who Moey and Chandon were.

Terry Pratchett
ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

Terry Pratchett
Demons were like genies or philosophy professors - if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.

Terry Pratchett
He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.

Terry Pratchett
She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.

Terry Pratchett
You say that you people don't burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that's what true faith would mean, y'see? Sacrificin' your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin' the truth of it, workin' for it, breathin' the soul of it. That's religion. Anything else is just... is just bein' nice. And a way of keepin' in touch with the neighbors.

Terry Pratchett
Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

Terry Pratchett
They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time.

Terry Pratchett
Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.

Terry Pratchett
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.

Terry Pratchett
People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Terry Pratchett
Good or bad, do it as you. Too many lies and there's no truth to go back to.

Terry Pratchett
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.

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

Terry Pratchett
When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment.

Terry Pratchett
Normally its narrow streets were crowded with stalls, and people from all over the Carpet. They'd all be trying to cheat one another in that open-and-above-board way known as 'doing business'.

Terry Pratchett
It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it," said War testily, "the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocalypse.

Terry Pratchett
Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.

Terry Pratchett
I think you should be proud of not being worse than just deeply introverted and socially maladjusted.

Terry Pratchett
But…but you can't treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can't say yes please, I'll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d'hôte or nothing, otherwise... well, it would be silly.

Terry Pratchett
Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

Terry Pratchett
Got to be worth a try, I suppose," said Crowley. "It's not as if I haven't got lots of other work to do, God knows." His forehead creased for a moment, and then he slapped the steering wheel triumphantly. "Ducks!" he shouted. "What?" "That's what water slides off!" Aziraphale took a deep breath. "Just drive the car, please," he said wearily.

Terry Pratchett
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.

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

Terry Pratchett
He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.

Terry Pratchett