"Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?"
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Terry Pratchett quotes (page 25 of 72)
1.4K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke."
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"People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people."
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"People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins."
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"Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices."
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"...'I thought the rule was that all monks were shaved.' 'Oh, Soto says he is bald under the hair,'said Lu Tze. 'He says the hair is a separate creature that just happens to live on him."
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"Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words."
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"Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes."
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"What is magic? There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day."
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"It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them."
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"No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk."
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"As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book, wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book."
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"The key to winning, as always, was looking as if you had every right, nay, duty to be where you were. It helped if you could also suggest in every line of your body that no one else had any rights to be doing anything, anywhere, whatsoever."
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"Theres no stink more sorrorful than the stink of wet, burnt paper. It means: the end."
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"In the Ramtops village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away - until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence."
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"What're quantum mechanics?" "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose."
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"If women were as good as men they'd be a lot better!"
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"They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization."
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"They can ta'k our lives but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker"
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"The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates."
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