A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction QUOTES

2 " ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

4 " Firstly,” said Ponder, “Mr Pessimal wants to know what we do here.”
“Do? We are the premier college of magic!” said Ridcully.
“But do we teach?”
“Only if no alternative presents itself,” said the Dean. “We show ‘em where the library is, give ‘em a few little chats, and graduate the survivors. If they run into any problems, my door is always metaphorically open.”
“Metaphorically, sir?” said Ponder.
“Yes. But technically, of course, it’s locked.”
“Explain to him that we don’t do things, Stibbons,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “We are academics. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

6 " There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists* call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realize that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn’t. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

8 " Nanny had nothing against witches being married. It wasn’t as if there were rules. She herself had had many husbands, and had even been married to three of them. But "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

10 " YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

12 " When people talk about their great past they’re usually trying to excuse the mediocre present. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

14 " The world is but a tissue spread over the depths of Chaos. That which we call sanity is but a circle of firelight, "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

16 " Later I came to appreciate Josh Kirby’s art too. His creatures have a gleeful wild energy and intricacy—both brash and sophisticated—which is exactly right for these tales. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

18 " History records a great many foolish comments, such as, "it looks perfectly safe,” or “Indians? What Indians?” and Dogger added to the list with an old favourite which has caused more encyclopedias and life insurance policies to be sold than you would have thought possible.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you’d better come in. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

20 " It was obvious from the start that things weren’t quite right. This time they were supposed to be sending me to observe the crowning of Charlemagne in AD 800, and here I was in the wrong country and, according to the sky, about three centuries too soon. That’s the kind of thing that happens, like I said; it’s going to be at least fifty years before we get it right. Fifty-three years, actually, because I met this man in a bar in 1875 who’s from a hundred years in our future, and he told me. I told them at Base we might as well save a lot of effort by just, you know, bribing one of the future guys for the plans of the next model. They said if we violated the laws of Cause and Effect like that, there’s a good chance the whole universe would suddenly catastrophically collapse into this tiny bubble .005 angstroms across, but I say it’s got to be worth a try. "

― Terry Pratchett , A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction