"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."
Read quote
8 likes
Quote collection
Terry Pratchett quotes (page 18 of 72)
1.4K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A good man will kill you with hardly a word."
Read quote
8 likes
"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?"
Read quote
8 likes
"My idea of a good novel was one you made enough money out of to buy a greenhouse."
Read quote
8 likes
"In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language."
Read quote
8 likes
"If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you."
Read quote
7 likes
"Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery."
Read quote
7 likes
"but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?"
Read quote
7 likes
"Freedom without limits is just a word."
Read quote
7 likes
"Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy that eluded him at the moment."
Read quote
7 likes
"Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time."
Read quote
7 likes
"If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit."
Read quote
7 likes
"Even a really bad creator would at least have started with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Surprise."
Read quote
7 likes
"The thief, as will become apparent, was a special type of thief. This thief was an artist of theft. Other thieves merely stole everything that was not nailed down, but this thief stole the nails as well."
Read quote
7 likes
"If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail."
Read quote
7 likes
"If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship."
Read quote
7 likes
"He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower."
Read quote
7 likes
"Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken."
Read quote
7 likes
"Everything happens for a reason, except possibly football. (in Thief of Time)"
Read quote
7 likes
"I taught myself more in the library than school taught me."
Read quote
7 likes