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Terry Pratchett -
Life
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It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.
Terry Pratchett
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There was a certain something about the air in the city. You got the feeling that it was air that had seen life. You couldn't help noting with every breath that thousands of other people were very close to you and nearly all of them had armpits.
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Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was...
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An ancient proverb summed it up when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.
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Funny, reely," he said. "You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know.
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Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.
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The trouble with life was that you didn't get a chance to practice before doing it for real.
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If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.
Terry Pratchett
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His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.
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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.
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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.
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Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.
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In her own special category, she was quite beautiful. This was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at.
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There's no point in killing an opponent... There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.
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It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing' people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.
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Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.
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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.
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He never knew what to say. If life was a party, he wasn't even in the kitchen.
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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.
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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.
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No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
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So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It's the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulate s the inquisitive nodes, and there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.
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I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.
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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.
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It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.
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Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.
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Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.
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I dare say that quite a few people have contemplated death for reasons that much later seemed to them to be quite minor. If we are to live in a world where a socially acceptable "early death" can be allowed, it must be allowed as a result of careful consideration.
Let us consider me as a test case. As I have said, I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.
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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.
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The thing about witchcraft," said Mistress Weatherwax, "is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect
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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