Shandora Hendrix > Shandora's Quotes

“That's the trouble, you see. When you've had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don't know how to spit it out.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don't really care.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“The grags came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“The aristocrats, if such they could be called, generally hated the whole concept of the train on the basis that it would encourage the lower classes to move about and not always be available.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“The commander went, as they say in Ankh-Morpork, totally Librarian on them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Bandits and governments 'ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world...”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“It was like ... like wizardry, but without the wizards and the mess.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Everything is magic when you don’t know what it is. Your sliding rule is a magic wand to most people.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“the queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“people went looking to find themselves and what they found was somebody else.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“When the humours were handed out, Ankh-Morpork got the one for joking and Quirm had to do make do with their expertise in fine dining and love-making.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Tak did not expect the stone to have life, but when it did, he smiled upon it, saying "All Things Strive". Time and time again the last testament of Tak has been stolen in a pathetic attempt to kill the nascent future at birth and this is not only an untruth, it is a blasphemy! Tak even finds it in his heart to suffer the Nac Mac Feegles, possibly for their entertainment value, but I wonder if he will continue to tolerate us... He must look at us now with sorrow, which I hope will not turn into rage. Surely the patience of Tak must find some limitations elsewhere...”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“It is impossible to accommodate everyone and twice as impossible to please all the dwarfs.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“I see embarrassment among all of you. That's good. The thing about being embarrassed is that sooner or later you aren't, but you remember that you were.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Looking out the window, Moist saw a small swarm of goblins leave the train and at first he thought, ha! Trust the buggers to run away, and then he mentally corrected himself: that was storybook thinking and with clearer eyesight and a bit of understanding he realized that the goblins were scrambling up to the delvers on the rocks and beating the shit out of them by diving into the multiple layers of dwarf clothing. The delvers discovered all too rapidly that trying to fight while a busy goblin was in your underwear was very bad for the concentration.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“There are uproars and there are uproars, and this uproar stayed up for a very long time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“This'll keep me safe, Mother! I've the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t'quaderatics! Come one, Mother, stop fretting and come wi' me now to t'barn. You must see 'er!' Mrs. Simnel, reluctant, was dragged by her son to the great open barn he had knitted out like the workshop back at Sheepridge, hoping against hope that her son had accidentally found himself a girl.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled.
"Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?"
"What?"
"Oh, you'd like something simpler?”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“And what would humans be without love?"
RARE, said Death.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“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: The Play

“This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.”
― Terry Pratchett

“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: Stage Adaptation

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?”
― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

“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