"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
— Douglas Adams

"The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That's the advantage of space. It's big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.
People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.
There's nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there's a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere."
— Terry Pratchett (The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable)

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye. "
— Terry Pratchett (The Truth)

"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life."
— Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)

"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong."
— Terry Pratchett

"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..."
— Terry Pratchett

"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it."
— Terry Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment)

"It's no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way"
— Terry Pratchett

"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."
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
— Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms)

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. "
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles]."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"It was so loud and so deep, it wasn't really sound at all, just something that turned the air hard and then hit you with it."
— Terry Pratchett (The Bromeliad Trilogy)

"Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self."
— Terry Pratchett (Thud!)

"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."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
— Mark Twain

"Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."
— Mark Twain

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
— Mark Twain

"I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
— Mark Twain

"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
— Mark Twain

"If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much."
— Mark Twain

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
— Mark Twain

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
— Mark Twain

"The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop."
— Mark Twain

"'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
— Mark Twain

"Golf is a good way to ruin a walk."
— Mark Twain

"Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother."
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles
and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles...
...they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle
bottle paddle battle."
— Dr. Seuss (Fox in Socks)

""I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.""
— A. Whitney Brown

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"(writing, after being asked to explain Newton's First Law of Motion "in his own words"): Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz. (speaking) I love loopholes."
— Bill Watterson (There's Treasure Everywhere)

"I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself."
— Dave Barry

"A day without sunshine is like, you know, night."
— Steve Martin

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain