works-by-terry-pratchett

"Astfgl had achieved in Hell a particularly high brand of boredom which is like the boredom you get which a) is costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a nice time. (p. 165)"

"No-one with their sleeves rolled up who walks purposefully with a piece of paper held conspicuously in their hand is ever challenged. (pp. 47-48)"

"You didn't have to go and kick me!"

"You take, for example, a certain type of hotel. It is probably an English version of an American hotel, but operated with that peculiarly English genius for taking something American and subtracting from it its one worthwhile aspect, so that you end up with slow fast food, West Country and Western music and, well, this hotel. (p. 164)"

"There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities."

"At the gate was a large, heavy-set man, who was eyeing the queue with the smug look of minor power-wielders everywhere. (p. 46)"

"Rincewind gave his fingers a long shocked stare, as one might regard a gun that has been hanging on the wall for decades and has suddenly gone off and perforated the cat. (p. 44)"

"That was the thing about time travel. You were never ready for it. About the only thing he could hope for, Rincewind decided, was finding da Quirm's Fountain of Youth and managing to stay alive for a few thousand years so he'd be ready to kill his own grandfather, which was the only aspect of time travel that had ever remotely appealed to him. He had always felt that his ancestors had it coming to them. (p. 92)"

"Forever was over. All the sands had fallen. The great race between entropy and energy had been run, and the favorite had been the winner after all. (p. 133)"

"The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e. g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn't enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness. (p. 163)"

"It was the voice of someone who had seen it all and hadn't liked any of it very much. (p. 180)"

"A crude hut of driftwood had been built on the long curve of the beach, although describing it as "built" was a slander on skilled crude hut builders throughout the ages; if the sea had simply been left to pile the wood up it might have done a better job. (p. 2)"

"What the Bursar failed to consider was that no more bangs doesn't mean they've stopped doing it, whatever it is. It just means they're doing it right. (p. 13)"

"Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleaning, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. (p. 27)"

"‘I thought you were stuffed,' said Rincewind."

"Interestingly enough, 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 think they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight. (p. 35)"

"Godless people might get up to anything, they might turn against the fine old traditions of thrift and non-self-sacrifice that had made the kingdom what it was today, they might start wondering why, if they didn't have a god, they needed all these priests, anything. (p. 83)"

"He crawled back to Eric."

""I want to be a eunuch, sir," Eric added."

"He also appeared to have changed the course of history, although this is impossible since the only thing you can do to the course of history is facilitate it. (p. 126)"

"What're quantum mechanics?"

""Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind." (p. 153)"

"According to Ephebian mythology, there's a girl who comes down here every winter."

""Wossname!" said the parrot, who was sitting on his shoulder."

"The kings of Hell might have heard of words like "subtlety" and "discretion," but they had also heard that if you had it you should flaunt it and reasoned that, if you didn't have it, you should flaunt it even more, and what they didn't have was good taste. (pp. 186-187)"

"Now their long war was over and they could get on with the proper concern of civilized nations, which is to prepare for the next one. (p. 193)"

"The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield. (pp. 10-11)"

"The Archchancellor's most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar's point of view, without reading them first. (p. 11)"

"A month went by quickly. It didn't want to hang around. (p. 21)"

"Comes of spendin' too much time sitting indoors. A few twenty-mile runs and the Dean'd be a different man."

"You could always tell a wizard's robe; it was bedecked with sequins, sigils, fur and lace, and there was usually a considerable amount of wizard inside it. (p. 13)"

"When he was left alone he wandered over to the lectern and looked at the book. The title, in impressively flickering red letters, was Mallificarum Sumpta Diabolicite Occularis Singularum, the Book of Ultimate Control. He knew about it. There was a copy in the Library somewhere, although wizards never bothered with it."

"‘They never give him any of the things a sensitive growing wossname really needs, if you was to ask me.'"

"Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters. (pp. 34-35)"

"The prayers of most religions generally praise and thank the gods involved, either out of general piety or in the hope that he or she will take the hint and start acting responsibly. (p. 76)"

"The entire priesthood was sitting around it and watching it carefully, in case it did anything amusing or religious. (p. 80)"

"After all, the whole point of the wish business was to see to it that what the client got was exactly what he asked for and exactly what he didn't really want. (pp. 83-84)"

"He'd stopped wondering how he'd come to be here, wherever it was. Malign forces. That was probably it. At least nothing particularly dreadful was happening to him right now. Probably it was only a matter of time. (p. 86)"

"They were discussing strategy when Rincewind arrived. The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking. (p. 102)"

"He decided to try the truth again. It was a novel approach and worth experimenting with. (p. 105)"

""That's what you call metaphor," said Rincewind."

""The trouble is," he said, "is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so." (p. 124)"

"It also appears that creators sometimes favor the Big Bang method of universe construction, and at other times use the more gentle methods of Continuous Creation. This follows studies by cosmotherapists which have revealed that the violence of the Big Bang can give a universe serious psychological problems when it gets older. (p. 134)"

"All he had to do was be patient, and he was good at that. Pretty soon there'd be living creatures, developing like mad, running and laughing in the new sunlight. Growing tired. Growing old."

"Most of history is pretty appalling, when you look hard at it. Or even not very hard. (p. 147)"

"He'd looked death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly retreating head many times, and suddenly the prospect of living forever didn't appeal. (p. 149)"

"Now he realized what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them. For boredom to be enjoyable there had to be something to compare it with. (p. 169)"

""This is really horrible," said Eric, as they walked away. "It gives evil a bad name." (p. 171)"

"The speaker was Duke Vassenego, one of the oldest demons. How old, no one knew. But if he didn't actually invent original sin, at least he made one of the first copies. In terms of sheer enterprise and deviousness of mind he might even have passed for human and, in fact, generally took the form of an old, rather sad lawyer with an eagle somewhere in his ancestry. (pp. 173-174)"

"He'd looked at its ramshackle organisation, such as it was, with the eye of a lifelong salesman. There seemed nowhere in it for him, but this wasn't a problem. There was always room at the top. (p. 53)"