The Light Fantastic Quotes

“Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Of course I'm sane, when trees start talking to me, I don't talk back.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine...”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“As large as worlds. As old as Time. As patient as a brick.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“...the little man's total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“The short conversation that follows eventually led to a tree religion. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree and led a clean decent and upstanding life could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. 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 Hun 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.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“down below the mines and sea ooze and fake fossil bones put there by a Creator with nothing better to do than upset archeologists and give them silly ideas.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Do you think there’s anything to eat in this forest?”
“Yes,” said the wizard bitterly, “us.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“It had a very long pendulum,and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge,because it was the kind of deliberate annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life. It was the kind of sound that suggested very pointedly that in some hypothetical hourglass somewhere,another few grains of sand had dropped out form under you.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“That doesn't sound very reliable to me," said the druid nastily. "How can a book know what day it is? Paper can't count.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home." - Twoflower”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Are you a hero, actually?”
“Um, no. Not as such. Not at all, really. Even less than that, in fact.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“He’sh mad?’
‘Sort of mad. But mad with lots of money.’
‘Ah, then he can’t be mad. I’ve been around; if a man hash lotsh of money he’sh just ecshentric.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“He got down easily by dropping uncontrollably from branch to branch until he landed on his head in a pile of pine needles, where he lay gasping for breath and wishing he'd been a better person.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Six months ago he was a perfectly ordinary failed wizard. Then he met Twoflower, was employed at an outrageous salary as his guide, and has spent most of the intervening time being shot at, terrorised, chased and hanging from high places with no hope for salvation, or as is now the case, dropping from high places.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“The very fabric of time and space is about to be put through the wringer.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic