The Light Fantastic
Equal Rites
Mort
Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
Pyramids
Guards! Guards!
Eric
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods
Lords and Ladies
Men at Arms
Soul Music
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Feet ofClay
Hogfather
Jingo
The Last Continent
Carpe Jugulum
The Fifth Elephant
Terry Pratchett Quotes
Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
"Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead."
�Rincewind
Something small and distant broke through the cloud layer, trailing shreds of vapour. In the stratospheric calm the sounds of bickering came sharp and clear. "You said you could fly one of these things!" "No I didn't; I just said you couldn't!"
The old shaman said carefully, "You didn't just see two men go through upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?" The boy looked at him levelly. "Certainly not," he said. The old man heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness for that," he said. "Neither did I."
"What is an elephant?" "A kind of badger," Said Granny. She hadn't maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.
She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.
"This is the fourth floor. It�s lady�s bedroom. You�d be amazed at how many horses we don�t get up here."
�Princess Keli
"You're dead," he said. Keli waited. She couldn't think of any suitable reply. "I'm not" lacked a certain style, while "Is it serious?" seemed somehow too frivolous.
"PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT�S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT�D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN�T IT?"
-Death
"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"
Rincewind: I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet! I'm afraid of grounds.
Conina: You mean heights. And stop being silly.
Rincewind: I know what I mean! It's the grounds that kill you!
There were a few seconds of total silence as everyone waited to see what would happen next. And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life. "Erm," he said, "excuse me..."
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
"I'd like to know if I could compare you to a summer's day. Because -- well, June 12th was quite nice, and..."
�The Fool
"There must be a hundred silver dollars in here," moaned Boggis, waving a purse. "I mean, that's not my league. That's not my class. I can't handle that sort of money. You've got to be in the Guild of Lawyers or something to steal that much."
"Yes, bugger all that." said Nanny. "Let's curse somebody."
"Oh, obvious," said Granny. "I'll grant you it is obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true."
She had never mastered the talent for apologizing, but she appreciated it in other people.
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered in one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world greatests creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. it meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, openend a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
"We're bound to be truthfull," She said. "But there is no call to be honest."
All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.
All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee.
"It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing."
�Captain Vimes
"'E's fighting in there!" he stuttered, grabbing the captain's arm. "All by himself?" said the captain. "No, with everyone!" shouted Nobby, hopping from one foot to the other.
The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.
"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."
"Students?" barked the Archchancellor. "Yes, Master. You know? They're the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we're a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats --"
"There's nothin' wrong with bein' a son of a bitch."
�Gaspode (a talking dog)
"Well, 'scuse me. I was jus' tryin' to save the world."
�Gaspode
"Dead people walking around is unhygienic."
�Mustrum Ridcully
"I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT RIGHT NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF."
�Death
The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.
People didn't hit you over the head with farmhouses back home.
Nanny Ogg looked him up and down or, at least, down and further down. "You're a dwarf," she said.
His [Dydactylos] 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."
Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey.
"Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words."
Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.
The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.
"I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers."
Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.
Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.
In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
Chain-mail isn't much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn't when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes.
It's not enough to be able to pick up a sword. You have to know which end to poke into the enemy.
Carrot was two metres tall but he'd been brought up as a dwarf, and then further up as a human.
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
"Of course, just because we've heard a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong."
They looked at one another in incomprehension, two minds driving opposite ways up a narrow street and waiting for the other man to reverse first.
"Yes," said the skull. "Quit while you're a head, that's what I say."
"Goddammit, Rincewind is not a cheese! Rincewind is not a yoghurt or any kind of sour milk derivative! Rincewind is bloody nuisance!"
�The Dean
"Luck is my middle name. Mind you, my first name is Bad."
�Rincewind
Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed to even think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat.
"What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man."
Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows. [footnote: Er. That is to say, they went to bed at the same time as the chickens went to bed, and got up at the same time as the cows got up. Loosely worded sayings can really cause misunderstandings.]
After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way.
The pre-luncheon drinks were going quite well, Mr Bucket thought. Everyone was making polite conversation and absolutely no one had been killed up to the present moment.
Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harrassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room.
Angua: Don't worry, we won't need weapons.
Cheery: Oh, good.
Angua: They wouldn't be any use.
Cheery: Oh.
There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.
You never ever volunteered. Not even if a sergeant stood there and said, "We need someone to drink alcohol, bottles of, and make love, passionate, to women, for the use of." There was always a snag. If a choir of angels asked for volunteers for Paradise to step forward, Nobby knew enough to take one smart pace to the rear.
"I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE."
�Death
"Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"
It was hard enough to kill a vampire. You could stake them down and turn them into dust and ten years later someone drops a drop of blood in the wrong place and guess who's back? They returned more times than raw broccoli.
Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn't mix a metaphor.
"That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?"
"We took pity on him because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that."
�Lord Downey
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
"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."
"PEOPLE�S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED 'LIVING'."
� Death
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon � he'd run them all.
- "Remember -- that which does not kill us can only make us stronger."
- "And that which does kill us leaves us dead!"
Agnes: He is the king, Nanny.
Nanny: That�s no reason for him to go around acting like royalty.
Agnes: I think it is, actually.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
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?"
I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him.
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts.
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
-carina
