Quotefinder > Quotefinder's Quotes

“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

“There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“It was quite impossible to describe.

Here is what it looked like.

It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and it felt Paisley. It smelled like the total eclipse of the moon. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“People aren't just people, they are people surrounded by circumstances.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

“History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“Don't be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn’t do good for people, she did right by them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

“I tell you, commander, it's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.”
― Terry Pratchett, Snuff

“Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.”
― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times: The Play

“It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.”
― Terry Pratchett, Nation

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”
― Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.”
― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

“I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers... this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted.”
― Terry Pratchett

“What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.”
― Terry Pratchett

“In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we're frightened, the hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We are history! Everything we've ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are. [...]

I'm made up of the memories of my parents and my grandparents, all my ancestors. They're in the way I look, in the colour of my hair. And I'm made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum