Quote

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

Terry Pratchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Terry Pratchett
Age: 66 †
Born: 1948
Born: April 28
Died: 2015
Died: March 12
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Terence David John Terry Pratchett
Terence David John Pratchett
Sir Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John Pratchett
Bird
History
Make
Alter
People
Brief
Birds
Patterns
Sky
Fantasy

More quotes by Terry Pratchett

Image
These weren't encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a longbow's arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred yards away instead of the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.
Terry Pratchett
Image
Humans need fantasy in order to be human.
Terry Pratchett
Image
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.
Terry Pratchett
Image
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
Image
HOROSCOPE: Today is a good time for making new friends. A good deed may have unforeseen consequences. Don’t upset any druids. You will soon be going on a very strange journey. Your lucky food is small cucumbers. People pointing knives at you are probably up to no good. PS, we really mean it about the druids.
Terry Pratchett
Image
When in doubt, choose to live.
Terry Pratchett
Image
If I had been Terry Pratchett the farmer, or Terry Pratchett the dentist, nobody would have paid any attention if I had announced I had Alzheimer's. But there is something fascinating about an author losing the power over words.
Terry Pratchett
Image
I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.
Terry Pratchett
Image
I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.
Terry Pratchett
Image
The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.
Terry Pratchett
Image
Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things.
Terry Pratchett
Image
It's not lying when you do it to officers!
Terry Pratchett
Image
Death: Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.
Terry Pratchett
Image
Demons were like genies or philosophy professors - if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.
Terry Pratchett
Image
It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.
Terry Pratchett
Image
Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.
Terry Pratchett
Image
There has been a lot of bad fantasy in the past - I'm by no means saying that all classic fantasy out there is bad - but there has been a lot of bad fantasy written by people who read a lot of fantasy and so all they keep doing is recycling it.
Terry Pratchett
Image
'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.
Terry Pratchett
Image
One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.
Terry Pratchett
Image
If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.
Terry Pratchett