It Was Said Later That He Came Under Bad Influences At This Stage. But The Secret Of The History Of Edward

“It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself.

That’s where people get it wrong. Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are... well... human beings.”

-Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

"An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis."

-Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic

“People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with a problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.”

-Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

“The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.” - Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Vimes sank gloomily into his armchair. It was, he felt, a persistent flaw in his wife’s otherwise practical and sensible character that she believed, against all evidence, that he was a man of many talents.”

-Terry Pratchett’s The Fifth Elephant

“Just because you have a choice, it doesn’t mean that any of them has to be right.”

-The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster