A community for all things related to the Discworld series of books by Sir Terry Pratchett.
“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.” ― Small Gods
A close second is also from the Small Gods; the very dark
“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”
Those are good ones! Small Gods is such a great book and really touches on some surprisingly dark stuff for so early in the series.
GNU PTerry.
I need to read small gods next ...
I played the Duke in a Stage adaptation of Weird Sisters and the whole cast wrote quote for their character in the front of their script. Mine was
“The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.”
Haha, love this! Really gives you so much of a sense of his character in such a simple statement.
I saw a local production of this a few years ago too, wonder if they did anything similar. Sadly the only DW production they've done, but it was great. Have you been in any others?
Unfortunately not this was many years ago (college production!) but loved every minute of it - I find his work translates very well to the stage
No specific quote, just a thought that Vimes has several times...If you'll do something bad for a good reason, you're that much closer to doing something bad for a bad reason.
Vimes honestly has so many moral lessons, reading him as I grew up definitely had a good influence. I'm just rereading Guards atm and seeing him (literally) pull himself out of the gutter and start on that inexorable path to being better is so satisfying.
This one from Pyramids:
The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human's eye and get away with it.
Always loved the idea that animals are just making idiots of us and using us for their own purposes.
Terry was so clever here in telling us that humans are super-shitty to animals and making us agree that yes we do deserve to be spat on by them.
No one did dark humour better than him. GNU PTerry.
I think this concept comes up again in later books too, right? Maybe Jingo is what I'm thinking of but then again maybe not. Anyway, I've always liked this idea too and have definitely repeated it irl as a genuine theory to various bemused bystanders.
You ever use a quote or concept so much you forget you didn't make it up yourself? Maybe that's a whole other thread topic in itself lol.
Vimes "Boots" theory is like that for me. A semester course worth of socioeconomics in 1 line.
The Boots theory from Men at Arms - "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
"People believe they want justice and wise government but, in fact, what they really want is an assurance that tomorrow will be very much like today."
Vetinari (Feet of Clay)
I don't see this one come up often when talking about Pratchett's work, but it's the one I see every day out there in my life!
The one that made me burst out laughing even after decades of reading Pratchett was 'Minge drinking'
But my fave was the repeated nesting footnotes on Fingers Mazda. You can hear Pterry's cackling through the page.
The ones where you can just tell he's having a great laugh at his own jokes are the absolute best!
There was a discussion on here recently about adaptations, and I said in that thread they all kind of feel a bit empty to me because they're missing that added presence of someone nudging you in the ribs and winking.
Not that underrated, but don't see it around as much as it deserves too. From The Truth:
"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. 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! Who's been pinching my beer? 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 had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye."
Think it's from Intersting Times:
See, that's why there is rules. ... So that you think before you break 'em.
I haven't read that one in...must be at least twenty years. But perhaps this quote stuck with my subsconscious because that's definitely how I approach rules 😄