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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.
Terry Pratchett
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The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett
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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.
Terry Pratchett
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Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
Terry Pratchett
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She had heard it said that, before you could understand anybody, you needed to walk a mile in their shoes, which did not make a whole lot of sense, because probably AFTER you had walked a mile in their shoes, you would understand that they were chasing you and accusing you of the theft of a pair of shoes—although, of course, you could probably outrun them, owing to their lack of footwear.
Terry Pratchett
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Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.
Terry Pratchett
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Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.
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It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
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'You're not going to die, are you sir?' he said.
'Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about.'
Terry Pratchett
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Of course, Ankh-Morpork's citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed.
Terry Pratchett
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Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.
Terry Pratchett
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Of course, like all the informal inhabitants of the University the roaches were a little unusual, but there was something particularly unpleasant about the sound of billions of very small feet hitting the stones in perfect time. Rincewind stepped gingerly over the marching column. The Librarian jumped it. The Luggage, of course, followed them with a noise like someone tapdancing over a bag of crisps.
Terry Pratchett
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Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.
Terry Pratchett
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The sign, which says: "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door!" - Of course, I've read it. Why do you think I want it opened?.. To see why they wanted it shut, of course. This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.
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Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already.
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A world like that, which exists only because the gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive. And sex too, of course.
Terry Pratchett
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But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
Terry Pratchett
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The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.
Terry Pratchett
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Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,' said Twoflower. 'And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,' he paused, then added, 'well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.
Terry Pratchett
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Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn't just about you.
Terry Pratchett
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Silverfish looked down. "Oh. Are you a dwarf?" Cuddy gave him a blank stare. "Are you a giant?" He said. "Me? Of course not!" "Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.
Terry Pratchett
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DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.
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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.
Terry Pratchett
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"There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based."
Terry Pratchett
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Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb — they're often students, for heaven's sake.
Terry Pratchett
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That's one form of magic, of course." "What, just knowing things?" "Knowing things that other people don't know.
Terry Pratchett
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Rincewind shivered. He was not, of course, an atheist; on the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists. On the few occasions when he had some spare change he had always made a point of dropping a few coppers into a temple coffer, somewhere, on the principle that a man needed all the friends he could get. But usually he didn't bother the Gods, and he hoped the Gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.
Terry Pratchett
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I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else.
Terry Pratchett
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This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate...)
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The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves…He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.
Terry Pratchett
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Quote of the day
Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose — Anything goes.
Cole Porter
Terry Pratchett
Creative Commons
Born:
April 28, 1948
Died:
March 12, 2015
(aged 66)
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