Will > Will's Quotes

“It might interest you to know," Tully says, "that there's a reason people build miniatures. Doesn't matter if it's guys laying out model railroads or women decorating dollhouses. It's about control. It's about reinventing reality." [...] "Some people get a lot of satisfaction in creating a little world they can escape to. In making things turn out the way they want, at least in their dreams.”
― Jane Lotter, The Bette Davis Club

“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

“hot dogs are not sandwiches (they are, in fact, American tacos).”
― Jack Townsend, Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One

“What can’t be cured must be endured.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth … that they are, despite everything, acts of love.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Edgar Malroy used to say that the Old World should celebrate Thanksgiving too, because we had got rid of so many religious nuts when the American colonies were set up.”
― Bo Fowler, Scepticism inc

“It’s not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.* They are so much brighter that they soon realized that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human’s eye and get away with it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“They can handle loneliness. Now death, that’s a tsuris.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“Any fool female can procreate. Cows have babies every spring, but cows can’t publish a book or plant a garden or sit in a porch swing and admire the sunset. That’s making something of your life. Having babies is like going to the bathroom. Sure, it’s natural, but it’s not worth bragging about.”
― Tim Sandlin, Lydia: A Novel

“If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules, of Hector and Lysander and such great names as these. In fact, throughout the history of the multiverse people have said nice things about every cauliflower-eared sword-swinger, at least in their vicinity, on the basis that it is a lot safer that way.”
― Terry Pratchett, Eric

“I like that kid. She’s got a wonderful angry energy. Like she’s decided life is crap and we’re all just killing time until we meet a slow and painful death. She is well ahead of the game on that front.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“There is no moral to the story. We always look for the moral of a story or some nice adage, but morals and adages never changed anyone’s life. That there is no moral of the story – that’s the moral of the story.”
― Kim Un-Su, The Cabinet

“Advice for the agein’ man. Never waste an erection, never trust a fart, never pass a jacks.”
― Roddy Doyle, Love

“It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, “O great table, without whom we are as naught.” Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off anymore clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No specters haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“You don’t park in the handicapped space lest the forces of irony give you a reason to, and you don’t speak ill of the dead unless you want to get bagged next.”
― Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping

“Cookies snitched from the jar are always sweeter than those served on a plate, and nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism.”
― Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping

“She was also cursed with the kind of terrifying certainty found only in drunks, religious zealots and people who used the word ‘sheeple’ on social media.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“could of done with some of that years ago. The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“On the radio, turned low, Reba sang of hard times with the full authority of a cross-eyed redheaded millionaire.”
― Christopher Moore, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, “It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting, do you want to be a plowman like your father?”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford,”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“The captain frowned. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, “but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“You can’t inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods