"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."-- Terry Pratchett
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.-- Terry Pratchett
Don't you talk to me about progress. Progress just means bad things happen faster.-- Terry Pratchett
I try to make computers say things like "You have 60 seconds to achieve safe distance".-- Terry Pratchett
"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."-- Terry Pratchett
"He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat."-- Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)
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
I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
I'm sure we can arrange an academic scholarship for Detritus. Troll cheerleaers would be nice: 'Two... four.... er.. many... lots'.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.-- Terry Pratchett
The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was "la," but she was making it work hard.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there's no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum...-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.-- Terry Pratchett ("Equal Rites")
"The I.S.O. standard unit of female pulchritude is the milli-Helen. This is the amount of beauty capable of causing the launching of a single ship."-- Terry Pratchett
She wanted a holiday in Australia, she said, and if I turned it into work she'd hit me--so I gave in, because I did not want to be beaten about the Bush.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
You can't remember the plot of the Dr. Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"[The] human mind was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it'd carry on pointing the same way."-- Terry Pratchett (Johnny and the Dead)
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly."-- Terry Pratchett (Soul Music)
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.-- Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)
And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.-- Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
The door opened. It opened very slowly, and with the maximum amount of creak. Simple neglect wouldn't have caused that depth of groan; you'd need careful work with hot water over a period of weeks.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
I always call it 'Tour Flu', because two or three weeks in hot bookshops with hundreds of people usually produces an ailment of some kind. Going on tour is like a box of rare diseases--you never know what you're going to get.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.-- Terry Pratchett
I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
I was thinking of 'duh?' in the sense of 'a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presense.'-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
Magrat shivered. She told herself that a witch had absolute control over her own body, and the goosepimples under her thin nightdress were just a figment of her own imagination. The trouble was, she had an excellent imagination.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it.-- Terry Pratchett
"You mean it's all pretending?" said Victor.
The trolls exchanged a brief glance, which nevertheless contrived to say: amazing, isn't it, that things like this apparently rule the world.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
Ponder: "It's all done by magic, Archchancellor."
Ridcully: "Ah. Right. None of that complicated business with springs and cogwheels and tubes and stuff, then."
Ponder: "That's right, sir. Just magic. Sufficiently advanced magic."-- Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)
AFPer: Terry, what the heck was going on at the end of Strata? I've just re-read the ending again and come up with another possible explanation which takes the total number into double figures.
TP: See? Other people would just have given you one or two. Amazing value, I think.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
It's an old magical principle -- it's even filtered down into RPG systems -- that magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be 'stored' -- in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, `You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.'-- Terry Pratchett
"One minute I'm just another rabbit and happy about it, next minute whazaam, I'm thinking. That's a major drawback if you're looking for happiness as a rabbit, let me tell you. You want grass and sex, not thoughts like 'What's it all about, when you get right down to it?'"-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
Magrat looked up guiltily. She had been deep in conversation with the Fool, although it was the kind of conversation where both parties spend a lot of time looking at their feet and picking at their fingernails. Ninety per cent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarassment.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They'd got so good at pattern-recognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they'd run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
"I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worth while?"
Death thought about it.
"Cats," he said eventually, "Cats are Nice."-- Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)
And even priests were coming to spend some time in it, because of the collection of religious books. There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one--according to itself--the only one any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together.-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)
He flung himself flat on the swaying roof, held out the crossbow, shut his eyes and fired.
In accordance with ancient narrative practice, the shot ricocheted off someone's helmet and brought down an innocent bird some distance away, whose only role was to expire with a suitable humorous squawk.-- Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)
There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.
At least, there's a saying that there's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
"Aaaarghhhh."
This was the noise made as he missed the lurching Thing by several meters and was realising that, if you have tied a rope to the top of a very high and extremely solid stone tower and are now swinging towards it, failing to hit something on the way is an error which you will regret for the rest of your truncated life.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.
In summer she used it as a beer cooler.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
"What shall we do?" said Twoflower.
"Panic?" said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabretoothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying "What a magnificent brute!" and "Here, pussy."-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
The ability to ask questions like `Where am I and who is the "I" that is asking?' is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish. [Footnote: Although of course it's not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations]-- Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)