Snake > Snake's Quotes

“And gears," said Anathema. "My bike didn't have gears. I'm sure my bike didn't have gears."

Crowley leaned over to the angel. "Oh lord, heal this bike," he whispered sarcastically.

"I'm sorry, I just got carried away," hissed Aziraphale.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“He stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness.

"You know," he concluded, after a while, "I think he actually looks like an Adam.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“There was no light at the end of the tunnel--or if there was, it was an oncoming train.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I mean, d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird-"
-"What little bird?" said Aziraphale suspiciously.
-"This little bird I'm talking about. And every thousand years-"
-"The same bird every thousand years?"
-Crowley hesitated. "Yeah," he said.
-"Bloody ancient bird, then."
-"Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-"
-"-limps-"
-"-flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-"
-"Hold on. You can't do that. Between here and the end of the universe there's loads of-" The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. "Loads of buggerall, dear boy."
-"But it gets there anyway," Crowley persevered.
-"How?"
-"It doesn't matter!"
-"It could use a space ship," said the angel.
Crowley subsided a bit. "Yeah," he said. "If you like. Anyway, this bird-"
-"Only it is the end of the universe we're talking about," said Aziraphale. "So it'd have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you've got to-" He hesitated. "What have
they got to do?"
-"Sharpen its beak on the mountain," said Crowley. "And then it flies back-"
-"-in the space ship-"
-"And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again," said Crowley quickly.

There was a moment of drunken silence.

-"Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak," mused Aziraphale.
-"Listen," said Crowley urgently, "the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-"

Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds' beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.

-"-then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music."

Aziraphale froze.

-"And you'll enjoy it," Crowley said relentlessly. "You really will."
-"My dear boy-"
-"You won't have a choice."
-"Listen-"
-"Heaven has no taste."
-"Now-"
-"And not one single sushi restaurant."

A look of pain crossed the angel's suddenly very serious face.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying 'THIS IS IT!'? ... I mean, why do that if you really don't want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it's all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you've built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.”
― Neil Gaiman , Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.

This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.

The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.

This proves two things:

Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Secondly, the Earth's a Libra.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“In fact, the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge, and green, and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves.

This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister spraying the leaves, and talking to the plants....

Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did.

What he did was put the fear of God into them.

More precisely, the fear of Crowley.

In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt, or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it..."

Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat.

The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.”
― Terry Prachett talking about Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.”
― Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.”
― Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.”
― Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I’d just like to say,” he said, “if we don’t get out of this, that…I’ll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you.” “That’s right,” said Crowley bitterly. “Make my day.” Aziraphale held out his hand. “Nice knowing you,” he said. Crowley took it. “Here’s to the next time,” he said. “And…Aziraphale?” “Yes.” “Just remember I’ll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“And just when you'd think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'
26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.”
― Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon. 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. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course. One of them had written it, hadn’t he…”Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“The ducks in St James's Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James's Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men -- one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf -- and it'll look up expectantly.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street”
― W.H. Auden