Some Terry Pratchett quotes India must read closely

Sir Terry Pratchett is dead, and his work, his amazing imagination, warmth, humour, compassion, humanity and rage were what made me become an actual storyteller myself. I wanted to write something about him, but writing about a person who really changed your life is incredibly difficult: Nothing you say seems right. And over the next few days, wonderful writers who actually knew the man will be doing that, and you should find the time to read them, to read about the man with the greatest imagination of this era. 

I don’t know how many of the readers of this site are familiar with his work. Regardless of whether they’ve read a single book or 70, those who have read Pratchett share my grief today. For those who have not, here are a few Terry Pratchett quotes India would do well to read closely today. Put together, they may sound like a sermon, but that’s not what they were in his texts; they were all asides, little side-swipes dealt out in passing as he marched on with whatever story the main magic trick was. Hopefully they will encourage you to explore his incredible work.

"Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people."

“It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it.”

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

“If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”

“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

“The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.”

“If cats looked like frogs we’d realise what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.”

“Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”

“Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”

"It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”

“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.”

"'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.”

“You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.”

“I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.”

“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.”

“Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.”

“This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.”

“I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him.”

“DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot’.”

“I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.”

“Anyway, just because you're sworn enemies doesn't mean you can't be friends, does it?”

I do not have the words to pay fitting tribute to Terry Pratchett. Read his books if you haven’t yet. Read them again if you have.