A dwarf on the up and up was really on his uppers, and upper-class dwarfs were lower class. A dwarf who was rich, healthy and had respect and his own rat farm justifiably felt at rock bottom and was held in low esteem. When you talked to dwarfs, you turned your mind upside down. (UA)
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'In any case the rules don't concern us at this point. We have to play the game in any eventuality and so we will abide by them in the best traditions of sportsmanship until we have worked out where they may be most usefully broken to our advantage'. (UA)
The wizards, once they understood the urgency of a problem and then had lunch, and argued about the pudding, could actually work quite fast. Their method of finding a solution, as far as the Patrician could see, was by way of creative hubbub. If the question was, ‘What is the best spell for turning a book of poetry into a frog?’, then the one thing they would not do was look in any book with a title like Major Amphibian Spells in a Literary Environment: A Comparison. That would, somehow, be cheating. They would argue about it instead, standing around a blackboard, seizing the chalk from one another and rubbing out bits of what the current chalk-holder was writing before he’d finished the other end of the sentence. Somehow, though, it all seemed to work. (LH)
Granny Weatherwax was not an advertisement for witchcraft. Oh, she was one of the best at it, no doubt about that. At a certain kind, certainly. But a girl starting out in life might well say to herself, is this it? You worked hard and denied yourself things and what you got at the end of it was hard work and self-denial. (SLF)
Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate ... (FOC)
'And these young me- people are clearly very successful,’ he added. This obviously carried a lot of weight with the mayor, as it does with many people. No-one likes a poor thief. (SM)
As for Wobbler…Wobbler wasn’t even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn’t let him join. He had a Nerd Pride badge and he messed around with computers. What Wobbler wanted was to be a kid in milk-bottle-bottom glasses and a deformed anorak, who could write amazing software and be a millionaire by the time he was twenty, but he’d probably settle for just being someone whose computer didn’t keep smelling of burning plastic every time he touched it. (JB)
He knew what he had to do. It was, of course, an impossible task. But he was used to them. Dragging a rat all the way from the wood to the hole had been an impossible task. But it wasn’t impossible to drag it a little way, so you did that, and then you had a rest, and then you dragged it a little way again…The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each one of them into tricky jobs, and each one of them. (Truck)
Witches would prefer to cut enemies dead with a look. There was no sense in killing your enemy. How would she know you’d won? (W)
'The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.' (GP)
You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible. (GP)
'Always move fast Mr Spools. You never know who’s catching up.' (GP)
... it wasn’t that good things were happening, it was just that bad things had stopped. (MR)
'Lads you’re just flapping your mouths. There’s been fighting, and here you are with all your arms and legs and walking around in the gods’ good sunlight. That’s winning, that is. You’ve won, see. The rest is just gravy.' (NW)
Silver stars weren’t awarded frequently and gold stars happened less than once a fortnight, and were vied for accordingly. Right now Miss Susan selected a silver star. Pretty soon Vincent the Keen would have a galaxy of his very own. To give him his due he was quite uninterested in which kind of star he got. Quantity, that was what he liked. Miss Susan privately marked him down as Boy Most Likely to Be Killed One Day By His Wife. (TOT)
There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who has no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. (TT) ... the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works. (TT)
'I never sacrifice a pawn,’ said the Lady.
‘How can you hope to win without sacrificing the occasional pawn?’ ‘Oh, I never play to win.’ She smiled. ‘But I do play not to lose.' (IT) 'It’s not how you finish that matters,’ said Buddy. ‘It’s how you get there.' (SM)
'The price for being the best is always…having to be the best.' (LL)
Cats are like witches. They don’t fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There’s no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won’t know they’ve lost, and to be real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows
it. There’s no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure. (WA) ... it was possible to believe that this wonderful state of affairs might continue.
And even if it didn’t, then there were the memories to get them through. Of running, and people getting out of the way. Of the looks on the faces of the horrible palace guard. Of, when all the thieves and heroes and gods had failed, of being there. Of nearly doing things nearly right. (GG) Magrat knew she had lost. You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how. (WS)
For a moment the rank felt as though they had just returned from single-handedly conquering a distant province. They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt. (GG)
... it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. (ER)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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