Pradip > Pradip's Quotes

“Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Knowledge equals power...
The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.
Power equals energy...
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Energy equals matter...
He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour.
Matter equals mass.
And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you're setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn’t in the job.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it anymore you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Where do you think they've gone?' he said.
'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.
'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.'
'Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.'
'But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'
Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.
'Most people seem to manage,' she said.
She reached across the table and touched his hand.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“How do you spell 'contravention'?" said Carrot, turning over a page.

"I don't," said Nobby, pushing through the crowds.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He’d take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they’d been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and lowgrade paranoia. And stupidity, too. They’ve all sworn the oath, he thought, but not a man jack of ’em has even asked what a figgin is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“World all twisted up and wrong, like distorted glass, only came back into focus if you looked at it through bottom of bottle.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting anymore. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“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, Guards! Guards!

“He wondered what it was like in the Patrician’s mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“The Supreme Grand Master raised his arms. ‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘let us begin . . .’ It was so easy. All you had to do was channel that great septic reservoir of jealousy and cringing resentment that the Brothers had in such abundance, harness their dreadful mundane unpleasantness which had a force greater in its way than roaring evil, and then open your own mind . . .  .”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“I can play on their horrible little minds like a xylophone. It’s amazing, the sheer power of mundanity. Who’d have thought that weakness could be a greater force than strength? But you have to know how to direct it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.”
― Ted Chiang, The Best of Subterranean

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“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, Going Postal

“There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least they could tell the people he was their fault.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.”
― Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett