There is a rumour going around that I have found god. I think is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
“I create gods all the time — now I think one might exist,” Daily Mail (21 Jun 2008)
(Source)
Quotations by:
Pratchett, Terry
I don’t have much truck with the “religion is the cause of most of our wars” school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
“I create gods all the time — now I think one might exist,” Daily Mail (21 Jun 2008)
(Source)
It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds. I don’t think I’ve found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
“I create gods all the time — now I think one might exist,” Daily Mail (21 Jun 2008)
(Source)
If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abcesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say ‘yes’.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
(Attributed)
Usually cited to alt.fan.pratchett, but not found in the repository.
I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
(Frequent Phrase)
Pratchett used this phrase and variations on it on numerous occasions. Here are a few:
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
-- Hogfather (1996)
Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.
-- "I create gods all the time," Daily Mail (2008-06-21)
"I'd much rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel"
-- Guardian Book Club Q&A video, 7:19 Guardian (2009-12-19)
See also F. H. Knelman's essay, "Probing Man's True Nature" in 1984 And All That, Sec. 3 (1971):
In the last few years science has been racked by vexing questions concerning the nature of man. The fallen angel has departed and the rising ape appeared.
There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
[I]t was followed by a long scream of rage mixed with a roar of complaint: “AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!” which is the traditional sound of a very small child learning that with balloons, as with life itself, it is important to know when not to let go of the string. The whole point of balloons is to teach small children this.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
A Hat Full of Sky, ch. 11 “Arthur” (2004)
This is apparently the origin of the much more frequently found paraphrase:
There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.
This shorter form has been used, among other places, in a Change.org petition to Death to reinstate Pratchett after the author's passing. It is possible Pratchett may have used it somewhere else, but I am unable to find it (it does not show up in the alt.fan.pratchett board in any message from him).
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that –”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes –”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things …”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Carpe Jugulum [Granny Weatherwax, Rev. Mightily Oats] (1998)
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of grey.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Carpe Jugulum [Rev. Mightily Oats, Granny Weatherwax] (1998)
THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT.
“Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Death’s Domain (1999)
(Source)
Death speaking with his manservant, Albert.
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 (1948-2015) English author
Diggers (1990)
And the funny thing was that people who weren’t entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Diggers (1990)
She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Equal Rites (1987)
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Equal Rites (1987)
(Source)
Frequently paraphrased:
The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It’s the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.
In the end, as every human being who has ever breakfasted on their own in someone else’s kitchen has done since nearly the dawn of time, he made do with unsweetened instant black coffee.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
“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. And don’t bother to answer. If we could understand, we wouldn’t be us. Because it’s all — all –”
INEFFABLE, said the figure feeding the ducks.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don’t let you go around again until you get it right.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
Hastur was paranoid, which was simply a sensible and well-adjusted reaction to living in Hell, where they really were all out to get you.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
If you take the long view, the universe is just something small and round, like those water-filled balls which produce a miniature snowstorm when you shake them. (Although, unless the ineffable plan is a lot more ineffable than it’s given credit for, it does not have a giant plastic snowman at the bottom.)
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (This is not actually true. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it.)
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
“But the Great Plan can only be a tiny part of the overall ineffability,” said Crowley. “You can’t be certain that what’s happening right now isn’t exactly right, from an ineffable point of view.”
“It izz written!” bellowed Beelzebub.
“But it might be written differently somewhere else,” said Crowley. “Where you can’t read it.”
“In bigger letters,” said Aziraphale.
“Underlined,” Crowley added.
“Twice,” suggested Aziraphale.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
He didn’t say “That’s weird.” He wouldn’t have said “That’s weird” if a flock of sheep had cycled past playing violins. It wasn’t the sort of thing a responsible engineer said.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.
Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Dramatis Personae” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
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 (i.e., 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.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Eleven Years Ago” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Eleven Years Ago” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
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 (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Eleven Years Ago” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They’d been brought up to it and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Eleven Years Ago” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
He’d been an angel once. He hadn’t meant to Fall. He’d just hung around with the wrong people.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Eleven Years Ago” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Crowley thumped the wheel. Everything had been going so well, he’d had it really under his thumb these few centuries. That’s how it goes, you think you’re on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Eleven Years Ago” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
“You’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a pantomime, though,” said Crawly. “I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying ‘Don’t Touch’ in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He’s really planning.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “In the Beginning” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Referring to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:16-17).
“Perhaps this isn’t just a test of the world,” said Crowley. “It might be a test of you people, too. Hmm?”
“God does not play games with His loyal servants,” said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice.
“Whooo-eee,” said Crowley. “Where have you been?”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Saturday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
“From what I remember,” replied Crowley, thoughtfully, “– and we were never actually on what you might call speaking terms — He wasn’t exactly one for a straight answer. In fact, in fact, He’d never answer at all. He’d just smile, as if He knew something that you didn’t.”
“And of course that’s true,” said the angel. “Otherwise, what’d be the point?”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Saturday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
So computers are tools of the Devil? thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn’t him.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Saturday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors — doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it. And on the other hand, you got people like Ligur and Hastur, who took such a dark delight in unpleasantness you might even have mistaken them for human.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Saturday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two Farthings = One Ha’penny. Two Ha’pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Saturday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Anyway, if you stop tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Saturday” [Adam] (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Three very crowded hours went past. They involved quite a lot of phone calls, telexes, and faxes. Twenty-seven people were got out of bed in quick succession and they got another fifty-three out of bed, because if there is one thing a man wants to know when he’s woken up in a panic at 4:00 A.M., it’s that he’s not alone.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Thursday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
They had once — at Adam’s instigation — tried a health food diet for a while one afternoon. Their verdict was that you could live very well on healthy food provided you had a big cooked lunch beforehand.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Thursday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Wednesday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
She’d stopped reading the kind of women’s magazine that talks about romance and knitting and started reading the kind of women’s magazine that talks about orgasms, but apart from making a mental note to have one if ever the occasion presented itself she dismissed them as only romance and knitting in a new form.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, “Wednesday” (1990) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
Etiquette tip: It’s okay, more or less, to ask an author to sign your arm, but not good manners to then nip around to the tattoo parlor next door and return half an hour later to show them the inflamed result.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Good Omens, Foreword (2006 ed.) [with Neil Gaiman]
(Source)
It was a five hundred mile journey and, surprisingly, quite uneventful. People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, “Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Guards! Guards! (1989)
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 (1948-2015) English author
Guards! Guards! (1989)
Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Guards! Guards! [Vetinari] (1989)
“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need … fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little –”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET — Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME … SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point –”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Some things are fairly obvious when it’s a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Hogfather (1996)
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)
She heard him mutter, “Can you take away this grief?”
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)
There is a lot of folklore about equestrian statues, especially the ones with riders on them. There is said to be a code in the number and placement of the horse’s hooves: If one of the horse’s hooves is in the air, the rider was wounded in battle; two legs in the air means that the rider was killed in battle; three legs in the air indicates that the rider got lost on the way to the battle; and four legs in the air means that the sculptor was very, very clever. Five legs in the air means that there’s probably at least one other horse standing behind the horse you’re looking at; and the rider lying on the ground with his horse lying on top of him with all four legs in the air means that the rider was either a very incompetent horseman or owned a very bad-tempered horse.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)
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 (1948-2015) English author
Interesting Times (1994)
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Jingo (1988)
The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Jingo (1997)
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Jingo (1997)
Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Jingo (1999)
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Lords and Ladies (1992)
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Lords and Ladies (1992)
If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Lords and Ladies (1992)
His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Maskerade (1995)
Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Men at Arms (1993)
Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.
They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Men at Arms (1993)
There was this about vampires: they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were … what was the word … deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Monstrous Regiment (2003)
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 (1948-2015) English author
Monstrous Regiment (2003)
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.
Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colorful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.
Albert grunted. “Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?”
Mort thought for a moment. “No,” he said eventually, “what?”
There was silence.
Then Albert straightened up and said, “Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ’em right.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Mort (1987)
Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Mort (1987)
In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one.
The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them.
It was crowded in the Curry Gardens on the corner of God Street and Blood Alley, but only with the cream of society — at least, with those people who are found floating on the top and who, therefore, it’s wisest to call the cream.
A faint smile hovered around the man’s lips. It was the sort of smile that lies on sandbanks waiting for incautious swimmers.
People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.
He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Mort (1987)
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Moving Pictures (1990)
The whole of life is just like watching a [film], he thought. 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 all out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.
Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Moving Pictures (1990)
The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Moving Pictures (1990)
You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world? … It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out. It’s all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Moving Pictures (1990)
Sometimes you laugh because you’ve got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you’re alive, when you really shouldn’t be.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Nation (2009)