Here are a few quotes from Pratchett's books. They are all from books that I own. I plan to add more. For those who want quotes organized by theme, here they are. I hope you enjoy!
Update: Added "Hogfather" 8/11/03
About Hogfather: Pterry says "Let's see, now... in HOGFATHER there are a number of stabbings, someone's killed by a man made of knives, someone's killed by the dark, and someone just been killed by a wardrobe. It's a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell."
Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
"I assure you the thought never crossed my mind, Lord."
"Indeed? Then if I were you I'd sue my face for slander."
"Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."
"While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe." Treatle nodded. "I hadn't looked at it like that," he said, "But you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance."
The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
It was turning out to be one of those days...the sort that you got every day.
[Gnomes] had a built-in resistence to rules. They didn't just apply to the law, but to all invisible rules that most people obey unthinkingly, like "Do not attempt to eat this giraffe" or "Do not head-butt people in the ankle just because they wouldn't give you a chip."
"You've got it in you to be a really bad copper, Nobby. Breaks my heart to see you throwin' it all away to become a really bad waitress."
He wasn't strictly aware of it, but he treated even geography as if he was investigating a crime (did you see who carved out the valley? Would you recognize that glacier if you saw it again?)
She moved like someone who had grown used to her body and, in general, looked like what Vimes had heard described as "a woman of a certain age." He'd never been quite certain what age that was.
You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
In the Beginning It was a nice day.
Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.
Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.
It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.
Admittedly, he was listening to a Best of Queen tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more then a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.
I'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another.
(On the jacket) Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home.
"You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say."
Anathema didn't only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rainforests, whole grain in loves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island.
The kraken stirs. And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.
Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.
R. P. Tyler was not, however, satisfied simply with being vouchsafed the difference between right and wrong. He felt it his bounden duty to tell the world.
God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?" There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1)Silence; 2)Books must be returned no later then last date shown; and 3)Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
There must be a million stories in the naked city, thought Vimes. So why do I always have to listen to ones like these?
Out Fighting Crime. Pleass Call Again Later. Thankyou.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee.
It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.
A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it.
Thunder rolled. ... It rolled a six.
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
Mister Teatime had a trully brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvelous facets and rainbows but,ultimately, also something that was broken.
"Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs."
We took pity on him because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that.
It's a sad and terrible thing that high-born folk really have thought that the servants would be totally fooled if spirits were put into decanters that were cunningly labelled backwards. And also throughout history the more politically conscious butler has taken it on trust, and with rather more justification, that his employers will not notice if the whisky is topped up with eniru.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
"Wherever people are obtuse and absurd...and whenever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach...whenever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering..., yes Twyla: there is a Hogfather."
"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time."
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
"Ah," he said, "it would appear that I have died and gone to Paradise. Are you a houri?"
"I don't take to that kind of language, thank you," said Angua.
As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first set foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it's still attached to his leg, this is a bonus.
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hung Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword. All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.
"What is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?"
"Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper."
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.
"Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead."
And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up.
People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
"I reckon I should have to get up real early to put one over on you."
"I reckon you should never go to sleep."
"The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case..."
"My father is the Emperor of Klatch and my mother is a small tray of raspberry puddings."
"Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely."
It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end.
Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!
BEWARE!!!!!
Yrs sincerely
The Opera Ghost
Nanny could get a statue to cry on her shoulder and say what it really thought about pigeons.
No male had ever touched Agnes before, except perhaps to push her over and steal her sweets.
Hahahaha! Ahahahaha!
Yrs
The Opera Ghost
P.S. Ahahahaha!!!!!
The pre-luncheon drinks were going quite well, Mr Bucket thought. Everyone was making polite conversation and absolutely no one had been killed up to the present moment.
[Nobby] was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no-one knew where he kept it.
Sham Harga had run a succesful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits.
The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.
The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving.
If the Creator had said, "Let there be light" in Ankh-Morpork, he'd have gotten no further because of all the people saying "What colour?"
"Now, are you going to come on out or have I got to come in there and be brutally savaged?"
And shortly after that, for Corporal Carrot, the Discworld moved. And it didn't even bother to stop to cancel the bread and newspapers.
"This is your club with a nail in it. You will eat it. You will sleep on it! When Detritus says Jump, you say...what colour! We goin' to do this by the numbers! And I got lotsa numbers!"
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
The Rust family had produced great soldiers by the undemanding standards of "Deduct Your Own Casualties From Those Of The Enemy, And If The Answer Is A Postive Sum, It Was A Glorious Victory" school of applied warfare.
His movements could be called catlike, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.
He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue, then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn't be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence.
Upper-class etiquette in Ankh-Morpork held that, while you could snub your friends any time you felt like it, it was the height of bad form to be impolite to your worst enemy.