"Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?"
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Terry Pratchett quotes (page 13 of 72)
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"It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn’t do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn’t care because it didn’t know what “fair” meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you."
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"Ingenuity and incongruity always cheer me up."
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"The price of being the best is having to be the best."
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"The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"... was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"... well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told."
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"All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be "do as you would be done by." It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things."
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"There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world."
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"Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien's attic."
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"It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there."
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"Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it."
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"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 make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true."
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"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."
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"Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along."
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"I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel."
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"The purpose of this lectchoor is to let you know where we are. We are in the deep cack. It couldn't be worse if it was raining arseholes. Any questions?"
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"She was not, herself, hugely in favour of motherhood in general. Obviously it was necessary, but it wasn't exactly difficult. Even cats managed it. But women acted as if they'd been given a medal that entitled them to boss people around. It was as if, just because they'd got the label which said "mother," everyone else got a tiny part of the label that said "child"."
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"Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off."
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"It's no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way ."
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"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."
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"Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person."
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