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These are my favourite quotes from books I like, organised by author. |
 I have put the Good Omens quotes in the Neil Gaiman section, because Gaiman's listed first on the cover. The Colour of Magic "Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."
Wyrd SistersThe calender of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out. 'Possession is nine parts of the law, husband, when what you possess is a knife.'
Guards! Guards! This is all what you have to do, you walk along the Streets at Night, shouting, It's Twelve O'clock and All's Well. I said, What if it is not all well, and he said, You bloody well find another street.
The phrase "Set a thief to catch a thief" had by this time (after strong representations from the Thieves' Guild) replaced a much older and quintessentially Ankh-Morporkian proverb, which was "Set a deep hole with spring-loaded sides, tripwires, whirling knife blades driven by water power, broken glass and scorpions, to catch a thief." "Might have just been an innocent bystander, sir," said Carrot.
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it. FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC. [Make my day, punk.]
Reaper Man 'But, surely, er, dead people don't have rights?' said Windle. In the corner of his vision he saw Lupine put his hand over his eyes.
' [...] In my father's day, any Revenooer came around here prying around by himself, we used to tie weights to their feet and heave 'em into the pond.'
THERE'S A NEWT IN IT!
'Have you got any last words?'
ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION.
Witches Abroad And instead of getting on with proper science* scientists went around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and that there wasn't really anything you could call reality to know anything about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did you know there were possibly all these little universes all over the place but no one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves?
So, on the Discworld, people take things seriously.
Lords and Ladies Carter, tears of terror mingling with the make-up and the rain, squeezed the accordion. There was the long-drawn-out note that by law must precede all folk music to give bystanders time to get away.
I MUST SAY THESE ARE VERY GOOD BISCUITS. HOW DO THEY GET THE BITS OF CHOCOLATE IN?
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
'Ah, the brave girl ... come to save her fianc�, all alone? How sweet. Someone kill her.'
'I ain't against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they've got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take 'em to bits for the parts when we don't need 'em anymore, see? And elves far away in fairyland, well, maybe that's something people need to get 'emselves through the iron times. But I ain't having elves here. You make us want what we can't have and what you give us is worth nothing and what you take is everything and all there is for us is the cold hillside, and emptiness, and the laughter of the elves.'
Soul Music It was a poem about daffodils.
'That's a harp he's playing, Nobby,' said one of them, after watching Imp for a while.
Interesting Times "I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting "Forward, brave comrades!" you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!"
Many an ancient lord's last words had been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh."
Maskerade She'd even given herself a middle initial - X - which stood for "someone who has a cool and exciting middle name".
"I've been through the mill, I have," Bucket began, "and I made myself exactly what I am today-"
"... the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters..."
"Not talkative, the deceased. As a rule."
The Last Continent ??????????????TYPE INTRO????????????????????????
They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don't have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past. Any true wizard, faced with a sign like 'Do not open this door.Really. We mean it. We're not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,' would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, 'We told him not to.'
'"Terror Incognita" we called it when I was alive, master.'
Say what you like - that brown muck was good stuff. It was the runny equivalent of dwarf bread. You didn't really believe what your mouth said you'd just tasted, so you had some more. Probably full of nourishing vitamins and minerals. Most things you couldn't believe the taste of generally were.
'Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?'
NULLUS ANXIETAS. (no worries)
'Excuse me?' said Rincewind. 'By "Hell" do you mean some red hot place?'
'Just stalagmites and stalactites,' said Rincewind. 'I don't know how it works, but water drips on stuff and leaves piles of stuff. Takes thousands of years. Perfectly ordinary.'
'Y'know that sticky brown stuff you made? Well, the lads all tried it and they all went "yukk" and then they all wanted some more, so we tried cooking up a batch.'
Carpe Jugulum King Verence was very keen that someone should compose a national anthem for Lancre, possibly referring to its very nice trees, and had offered a small reward. Nanny Ogg reasoned that it would be easy money because national anthems only ever have one verse or, rather, all have the same second verse, which goes 'nur ... hnur ... mur ... nur nur, hnur ... nur ... nur, hnur' at some length until someone remembers the last line of the first verse and sings it as loudly as they can.
Perdita thought that not obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like "Don't fall into this huge pit of spikes" were there for a purpose.
He was trying to find some help in the ancient military journals of General Tacticus, whose intelligent campaigning had been so successful that he'd lent his very name to the detailed prosecution of martial endeavour, and had actually found a section headed What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not, but since the first sentence read "Endeavour to be the one inside" he'd rather lost heart.
Only You Can Save Mankind "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home."
"We got a talk about it at school. There's lots of stuff most girls can't do, but you've got to pretend they can, so that more of them will."
Johnny and the Dead "What I want to be," he said, "is something they haven't got a name for yet."
'The dead are no longer here and I am afraid they do not vote.'
The Alderman spread his arms and turned around. 'Shops full of cinematography televisions! Bright colours everywhere! Tall people with their own teeth! An age of miracles and wonders!'
Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding the door when it is really coming up through the floorboards. Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living. Johnny and the BombBigmac wasn't an athlete. If there was an Olympic Sick Note event, he would've won the 100 metres I've Got Asthma, the half marathon Lurk in the Changing Rooms, and the freestyle Got to Go to the Doctor. Kasandra was good at knowing things that were hushed up by the government, especially considering that they had been, well, hushed up. They were always slightly occult. When giant footprints had appeared around the town centre during some snow last year there had been two theories. There was Kir- Kasandra's, which was that it was Bigfoot, and Johnny's, which was that it was a combination of Bigmac and two 'Giant Rubber Feet, A Wow at Parties!!!!' from the Joke Emporium in Penny Street. Ki- Kasandra's theory had the backing of so many official sources in the books she'd read that it practiacally outweighed Johnny's, which was merely based on watching him do it.
alt.fan.pratchett "The Truckers trilogy has a fair amount of changes of a 'pavement = sidewalk' nature which is understandable in a book which should be accessible to kids. They also excised the word 'damn' so's not to get banned in Alabama, which is a shame because I've always wanted to be banned in Alabama, ever since I first heard of the place."
I must confess the the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occured to him.
Death isn't on line. If he was, there would be a sudden drop in the death rate. Although it'd be interesting to see if he'd post things like: DON'T YOU THINK I SOUND LIKE JAMES EARL JONES?
'They can ta'k our live but they can never ta'k our freedom!'
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 The Shadow in the North |
 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 'They stuff people's heads down the toilet first day at Stonewall,' he told Harry. 'Want to come upstairs and practise?'
Smeltings boys wore maroon tailcoats, orange knickerbockers and flat straw hats called boaters. They also caried knobbly sticks, used for hitting each other when the teachers weren't looking. This was supposed to be good training for later life.
'Are all your family wizards?' asked Harry, who found Ron just as interesting as Ron found him.
'And what if I wave my wand and nothing happens?'
Fred and George were wearing blue jumpers, one with a large yellow F on it, the other a G.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Harry - this is a Pocket Sneakoscope. If there's someone untrustworthy around, it's supposed to light up and spin. Bill says it's rubbish sold for wizard tourists and isn't reliable, because it kept lighting up at dinner last night. But he didn't realise Fred and George had put beetles in his soup.
Harry, at least, felt extremely foolish, staring blankly at the crystal ball, trying to keep his mind empty when thoughts such as 'this is stupid' kept drifting across it.
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 BookTitle???? Quote here...
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 Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard) Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, 'Well. At least I'm not dead.
Leviathan - The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney (John Birmingham) I am guessing, for instance, that the Prime Minister would not approve. But then, the Prime Minister can go fuck himself. And the horse he rode in on.
High Fidelity (Nick Hornby) "I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."
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