favorite quotes?

I do a lot of embroidery and have stitched two Pratchett quotes already (Nanny Ogg on Opera and a bit about logic. Annoyingly the Nanny Ogg one isn't exact, as the internet let me down that day.

Now I'm about to start another Pratchett piece and had the mad idea of doing one line from every book, so I was wondering what your favorite quotes are. I have a big list of them already, and I know you can see lists of them on various websites, but I thought this would be more interesting.

The one I'm about to start is: Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

"Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape." That one is on my wall.

"Dullness. Only humans could have invented it. What imaginations they had."

"You get a wonderful view from the point of no return."

"
'Well, well, we live and we learn, just like you said.'
'Some of us even do it the other way around.' "

"These men were philosophers. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no one else would consider for five seconds."

I think if you check out the early game of quotes threads, those will hold a lot of people's favorites. I'm not good at remembering specifics, but I love to read them. :) Lovely work you are doing.

Yeah, I've looked a bit in those threads, but of course you have to guess right to then produce a quote of your own (and it can be annoying to scroll through lots of non-quotes). This way anyway can set down favorites and maybe it will be a good reference for someone else along the line (plus it's neat to see what people focus on, in terms of subject matter).

"Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree."

"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."

"There was much pushing and shoving and honking of noses and falling of prats. It was a scene to make a happy man slit his wrists on a fine spring morning."

This one is rather long, but I must stitch it for my dad (he's a librarian and has known librarians who were like this):
The librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where nature intended them to be.

One that I've always held on to from the Discworld (I'm working from memory here, so it may be inexact)-

"Remember, the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show."

"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."

A bit long but sometimes I wish I have printed copies of it to pass around :)

And
"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time."

I ATE'NT DEAD

I am reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss at the moment and we are dealing with apostrophes at the moment so this little gem is right on target.

I think Carrot's "Personal isn't the same as important" gets my vote!

Yes! And Angua's "Everybody is somebody's terrier"

"Thieves were far better at controlling crime than the watch had ever been. After all, the watch had to work twice as hard to cut crime just a little, whereas all the guild had to do was work less."

Makes sense to me.........

Ah, but nobody puts it more succinctly than the librarian...

"Ook."

The librarian knuckled out into the library.........Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened librarian.

With a badge.

ETA: And from somewhere else:

......up ahead was one of the city's most fashionable traffic jams......

Love it.. .. .. ..

Does anyone remember the quote (it was kind of long) about the legend that people aren't gone as long as something they've made is still around? It talks about the last mead brewed, the last harvest collected, etc.

From Reaper Man, wasn't it?

I used a quote from Witched Abroad for a chapter in my thesis. It's traditional to include a quote after the title page of a PhD thesis, but I had too many couldn't decide which one to pick, so added one per chapter as well.

I don't have it in front of me, so this may not be exact, but it goes something like as follows:
"And the scientist panned through the universe like a prospector, looking for the gold of knowledge amidst the sand of uncertainty, the gravel of unreason and the eight legged swimming things of superstition".

Which, for a science thesis, seemed apposite. >:-)

Ha! That's awesome, Helen!

Oh! I have just read this and I love it:

"A night watchman in crappy armour is about your metier," he said and looked around proudly to see if anyone had noticed the slanty thing over the e.

Which book.. .. .. .. .. Anyone?

I wish I knew how to type the slanty thing over the e but my laptop won't let me.

Not too sure but I think it may be from Men at Arms.

> Yes. Well Done! What a lovely line, just your forte (with a slanty thing over the e):)

Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack.

My son chose Guards! Guards! to read for a political science class as a novel which works in political systems and workings.

"Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in." and
"Never build a dungeon you can’t get out of."

Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack.

not sure if anyone is around but today is election day, and I plan to post this on FB

There was something lascivious about the way the tree said "bees" that quite put Granny, who had several hives, off the idea of honey.

Equal Rites

glad we are bringing this thread back! I had some written down a while back, need to find it. the Death books are filled with them, as are the Witches books

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
--Carpe Jugulum

'THERE IS NO JUSTICE', said Death, 'JUST ME.'

>28 SF-72: Love that one.

>29 MrsLee:

Me too. And being in my early 50s, when I'm looking at such quotes or re-reading these books that I first read as a teen or in my early 20s, I sometimes realise just how much writers like Terry Pratchett and Robert A. Heinlein, too, influenced the way I see the world today. This quote is definitely part of that for me, and a pleasant one.

As a programmer I always had a fondness for Hex error messages.

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++