Quote

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

Terry Pratchett

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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
Wrong
Done
Something
Way
Always
Explanation
People
Million
Dead
Millions

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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.
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Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
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It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.
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You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.
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Botswana is also the only country in the world with a colour in its flag meant to represent rain (a sort of blue-grey). Not many people know this.
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It's daft, locking us up, said Nanny. I'd have had us killed. That's because you're basically good, said Magrat. The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.
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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.
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Bill Door was impressed. Miss Flitworth could actually give the word revenue, which had two vowels and one diphthong, all the peremptoriness of the word scum.
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Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening.
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Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.
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Out of Print is bookseller speak for We can't be hedgehogged.
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First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.
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And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.
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I'm interested in mythology generally, but India has no special place in my heart - although Hindu gods seem a lot more fun.
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Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was.
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This is a lovely party, said the Bursar to a chair, I wish I was here.
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Granny Weatherwas was not a jouster in the lists of love, but, as an intelligent onlooker, she knew how the game was played.
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Everything happens for a reason, except possibly football. (in Thief of Time)
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It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.
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Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
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