"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."
— Terry Pratchett

"Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you."
— Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

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

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues."
— Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"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

"She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you."
— Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites)

"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."
— Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

"There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist."
— Terry Pratchett

"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 believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight."
— Terry Pratchett (Eric)

"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)

"Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
— Haruki Murakami

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"To say goodbye is to die a little."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor."
— Raymond Chandler (Pearls Are a Nuisance)

"His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.'"
— Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

"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 treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide."
— Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic."
— Terry Pratchett

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!'"
— Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic)

"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)

"Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?"
— Terry Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment)

"Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.
And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find
herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella."
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"'I get it,' said the prisoner. 'Good Cop, Bad Cop, eh?'
'If you like.' said Vimes. 'But we're a bit short staffed here, so if I give you a cigarette would you mind kicking yourself in the teeth?'"
— Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)

"He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato."
— Terry Pratchett (The Fifth Elephant)

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

"Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things."
— Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)