Sad News du Jour

Valerie was deeply troubled to learn that the inimitable Terry Pratchett, who accompanied her in a literary sense during her voyage to Ireland and who has since taken over almost two shelves in one of her five bookcases, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

This news actually broke yesterday, and Valerie found out fairly quickly, but she has been rather upset over the whole thing and thus had difficulty putting insightful words together about it. He isn't dead, of course, which is a wonderful consolation that Valerie didn't have in the case of the late Douglas Adams, who did, in fact, die rather suddenly. Ditto for Kurt Vonnegut, although in his defense he was getting on in years.

Obviously Valerie doesn't know the man, but she knows his books. She likes to think that he is the kind of guy that you could sit with at a pub for hours, talking about how funny the world can be, the kind of guy that gets along with most people because he is kind and earnest and witty without being cruel.

Instead of getting all morbid, which is the kind of thing best left to the privacy of one's head sometimes, Valerie would like to share a few of her favorite Pratchett quotes:

"Getting an education was a bit like [getting] a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."

"Worlds of belief, she thought. Just like oysters. A little piece of shit gets in and then a pearl grows around it."

"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."

"Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk."

"For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks."

"It wasn't blood in general he couldn't stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting."

"In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."

"Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake."

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."

"The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match."

"Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off."

"The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to."

"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."

"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded."

"Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely."

"Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs."

"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head."

For more quotes, check out the Pratchett Quote File.