The collection / 875 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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875 results · Page 8 of 37Play this collection ▷

01c. 1981 AD

Cheese runners shouted at it, tried to grab it, and flailed at it with sticks, but the piratical cheese scythed onward, reaching the bottom just ahead of the terrible carnage of men and cheeses as they piled up. Then it rolled back to the top and sat there demurely while still gently vibrating.At the bottom of the slope, fights were breaking out among the cheese jockeys who were still capable of punching somebody, and since everybody was watching that, Tiffany took the opportunity to snatch up Horace and shove him in her bag. After all, he was hers. Well, that was to say she had made him, although something odd must have gone into the mix since Horace was the only cheese that would eat mice and, if you didn't nail him down, other cheeses as well.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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02c. 1981 AD

Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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03c. 1981 AD

I never said nothing...""I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You've got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn't dead!

Terry Pratchett / quote

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04c. 1981 AD

Good so be would you if, duff plum of helping second A," said the Bursar. The table fell silent. "Did anyone understand that?" said Ridcully. The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity som time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was quite often coherent, although not by normal human standards.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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05c. 1981 AD

But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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06c. 1981 AD

But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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07c. 1981 AD

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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08c. 1981 AD

Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!

Terry Pratchett / quote

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09c. 1981 AD

(About sweeping)....What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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10c. 1981 AD

. . . you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry King was all about business.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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11c. 1981 AD

It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man *would* have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead. It would be hard to be deader without special training.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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12c. 1981 AD

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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13c. 1981 AD

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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14c. 1981 AD

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old.These dates are incorrect.Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC.These suggestions are also incorrect.Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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15c. 1981 AD

It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ (Lit.: 'Thing-ies') or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five 'flavours', known as 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'sex appeal' and 'peppermint'.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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16c. 1981 AD

It was a large room, heavily outfitted with the usual badly ventilated furnaces, rows of bubbling crucibles, and one stuffed alligator. Things floated in jars. The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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17c. 1981 AD

How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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18c. 1981 AD

And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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19c. 1981 AD

Did I see them waving?' said Mrs Liberty'And particling, I shouldn't wonder' said the Alderman

Terry Pratchett / quote

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20c. 1981 AD

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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21c. 1981 AD

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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22c. 1981 AD

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.Someone had stolen a book.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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23c. 1981 AD

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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24c. 1981 AD

He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.

Terry Pratchett / quote

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