"You can think and you can fight, but the world's always movin', and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance."
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Quote collection
Terry Pratchett quotes (page 32 of 72)
1.4K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page."
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"There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short."
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"The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated."
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"Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha. The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion."
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"And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based."
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"The significant owl hoots in the night."
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"Chain-mail isn't much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn't when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes."
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"All things that are, are ours. But we must care. For if we do not care, we do not exist. If we do not exist, then there is nothing but blind oblivion. And even oblivion must end someday. Lord, will you grant me just a little time? For the proper balance of things. To return what was given. For the sake of prisoners and the flight of birds. Death took a step backwards. It was impossible to read expression in azrael's features. Death glanced sideways at the servants. Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
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"Funny, reely," he said. "You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know."
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"Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head and set off after it. No thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and policemen to chase anything that runs away."
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"You know what I'd really, really like? What I'd pay MONEY for? A ZX81 with a disc drive. I understood the ZX81. It was so easy to interface stuff to it."
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"I am death, not taxes. I turn up only once."
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"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."
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"Privilege (to the privileged) means having private laws."
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"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
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"It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course."
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"Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days."
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"I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do', but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."
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"Some of my best sources are ex-policemen, just to get a feeling of what it's like to be one. And it's quite different from being a civilian - except, of course, that I believe that policemen are just special sorts of civilians. Things like how hard it is to hold someone that doesn't want to be held. This is the kind of thing that is worth knowing."
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