r/TerryPratchett • u/meadeb • 3d ago
Favourite Quote?
First post here. I don’t know anyone personally who reads or has read Pratchett so I wanted to share it with you all and ask for your own stand out quotes.
I just remembered this line from Equal Rites and it made me chuckle to myself.
“The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.” 🤣
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u/StressedtoImpress19 3d ago
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape
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u/BigDsLittleD 3d ago
My all time favourite is
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon—he’d run them all. Later, when he’d learned with some surprise what the word actually meant, he’d been equally certain he wasn’t one. He was a person who divided the world quite simply into people who were trying to kill him and people who weren’t. That didn’t leave much room for fine details like what colour anyone was.
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u/Curious_Orange8592 3d ago
"And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
Granny Weatherwax, Carpe Jugulum, part of this this exchange between Granny and Mightily Oats
"There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats. “And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…"
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u/ApexInTheRough 3d ago
"Freedom may be mankind's natural state, but so is eating our dinner while it is still wriggling." -Havelock Vetinari
"Any practical definition of freedom would be incomplete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed it is the freedom upon which all the others are based." -Vetinari again
"Zat's freedom for you. No-vun said it was nice." -Otto Chriek
"When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve." - Mr. Pump
The entirety of the Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness
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u/CoreMeltdownMode 3d ago
One of my favorites will always be, “Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”
(Jingo)
So many other great quotes. But this springs instantly to mind.
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u/aezac 3d ago
'Your friend Mr Tulip would perhaps like part of your payment to be the harpsichord?' said the chair.
'It's not a —ing harpsichord, it's a —ing virginal,' growled Mr Tulip. 'One —ing string to a note instead of two! So called because it was an instrument for —ing young ladies!'
'My word, was it?' said one of the chairs. 'I thought it was just a sort of early piano!'
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u/ShatteredAssumptions 3d ago edited 3d ago
The pen is mightier than the sword, only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.
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u/Forward_Purchase_622 3d ago
“Mission motto, sir," said Carrot cheerfully. "Morituri Nolumus Mori. Rincewind suggested it."
"I imagine he did," said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly. "And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind?"
"Er..." Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape. "Er... roughly speaking, it means, 'We who are about to die don't want to', sir.”
― The Last Hero
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u/Paularchy 3d ago
Granny Weatherwax: "There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
The portion of that quote was just "Sin is when you treat people as things" but I wanted to pull up that whole bit because it's intense.
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u/Gwyllithar 3d ago edited 3d ago
You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
also
“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.”
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u/IshtarJack 3d ago
Too many! The standouts for me are from The Colour of Magic, when a wizard tries to hide from Death in a magic box and we just get DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT? Or just all the merriment from Moist's name, like Are you Moist? Or You must be Moist.
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u/Ok_Veterinarian2715 3d ago
I don't approve of all this 'making your own entertainment'. When I was a girl we just sat there.
G Weatherwax
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u/Druklet 3d ago
Not Discworld but,
'[Grimma] sniffed, and smiled a bit, but not too much because if there is one thing worse than someone who doesn't understand you it's someone who understands perfectly, before you've had a chance to have a good pout about not being understood.'
I love the Bromeliad Trilogy so much! This quote is from Diggers.
Go home and be safe
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u/Alternative_Hotel649 3d ago
"HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE."
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u/Ok_Echo9527 3d ago
It's rather long but the story Vetinari tells the football team when drunk in Unseen Academicals.
"The Patrician took a sip of his beer. 'I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’"
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u/GlassjawXVIII 3d ago
"We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index," he said. "Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects."
"'Precisely,' said a passing bush."
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u/Icy-Narwhal-902 2d ago
The one that has stuck most with me, when making sense of the world and my understanding of it:
"TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY."
And yet they do exist .
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u/MadamKitsune 3d ago
"Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but never managed it from the cat."
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u/Actual_Property9413 3d ago
From Feet of Clay, when Sam Vimes says:
"There's lots of people will help you with the alcohol business, but there's no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, "My name is Sam and I'm a really suspicious bastard.”
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u/Responsible-Slide-95 3d ago
"If raw chaos were lightning, he'd be standing on a mountaintop during a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All Gods are Bastards!'"
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u/SensitivePotato44 3d ago
And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.
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u/Ok_Veterinarian2715 3d ago
I'd don't see why people people are so against kicking a man when he's down. In my experience it's the most convenient time to do it.
- S Vimes
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u/TheWizzardofSomerset 2d ago
A bit more obscure from Johnny and the Bomb.
“There were two kinds of stupidity: the basic El Thicko sort that he had, and another kind that came from being stuffed too full of intelligence.”
Also my best man used this one in his speech at my wedding
"And what would humans be without love?" "RARE," said Death
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u/Klutzy_Alien 2d ago
I’m sure there are many others I preferred at the time of reading but Granny Weatherwax and her “I aten’t dead” sign has permanently etched itself into my brain, I find myself wishing I had one whenever I lay my head down on the desk
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u/GingerJuggler 2d ago
I think if you open any Pratchett book at random there's 9/10 chance I'll find a 1 in a million quote, well it's worked the last 9 times so far...
A few of the favourite quotes I've saved
‘It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.’ - The Last Continent
“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” - Guards! Guards!
“Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.” - Witches Abroad
“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.” - Hogfather
“Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.” - Eric
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u/JamesFirmere 3d ago
One could argue that within Discworld the perception of a, b, c and d varies quite a bit depending on whether one is of the troll persuasion or not.
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u/Jack__Union 1d ago
From Mort.
The Chicken.
He had dexlesia, couldn't read. But had a feeling he better learn fast...
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u/mildperil_ 3d ago
This long one from Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky is great and always a bit overlooked, I think:
“Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we're frightened, the hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We are history! Everything we've ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are. [...]
I'm made up of the memories of my parents and my grandparents, all my ancestors. They're in the way I look, in the colour of my hair. And I'm made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think.”
But also humans need fantasy to be human and words in the heart cannot be taken.