Morpork Quotes

1. "There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way."
Author: Terry Pratchett

2. "It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free."
Author: Terry Pratchett

3. "It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to 'serve the community' by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways."
Author: Terry Pratchett

4. "Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
Author: Terry Pratchett

5. "The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.The first question they ask is: 'Why was he eternally surprised?'And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.'The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were: 'Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.' And he was glad of it."
Author: Terry Pratchett

6. "In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don't really care."
Author: Terry Pratchett

7. "Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, poked at the ink in his inkwell. There was ice in it."Don't you even have a proper fire?" said Hughnon Ridcully, High Priest of Blind Io and unofficial spokesman for the city's religious establishment. "I mean, I'm not one for stuffy rooms, but it's freezing in here!""Brisk, certainly," said Lord Vetinari. "It's odd, but the ice isn't as dark as the rest of the ink. What causes that, do you think?""Science, probably," said Hughnon vaguely."
Author: Terry Pratchett

8. "The barricade was taking some while to dismantle. Chair legs and planks and bedsteads and doors and baulks of timber had settled into a tangled mass. Since every piece belonged to someone, and Ankh-Morpork people care about that sort of thing, it was being dismantled by collective argument."
Author: Terry Pratchett

9. "Now pull back briefly from the dripping streets of Ankh-Morpork, pan across the morning mists of the Disc, and focus in again on a young man heading for the city with all the openness, sincerity, and innocence of purpose of an iceberg drifting into a major shipping lane."
Author: Terry Pratchett

10. "The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could ‘better themselves', an achievement that might be attained, oh happy day, when they had ‘a little place of their own'. It was an inspiring dream, if you didn't look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong"
Author: Terry Pratchett

11. "In fact, if there were such a thing as an international thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone's wallets."
Author: Terry Pratchett

12. "She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized (fossils were well known on the Discworld, great spiraled shells and badly constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadow of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing."
Author: Terry Pratchett

13. "He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically"
Author: Terry Pratchett

14. "Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it'd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn't explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war."And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf," said Cheery sadly. "There's the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we're all dwarfs," she said, "but relations are strained."
Author: Terry Pratchett

15. "Vimes stared. It was true about the dogs. There didn't seem to be quite so many mooching around these days, and that was a fact. But he'd visited a few dwarf bars with Carrot, and knew that dwarfs would indeed eat dog, but only of they couldn't get rat. And ten thousand dwarfs eating continuously with knife, fork, and shovel wouldn't make a dent in Ankh-Morpork's rat population. It was a major feature in dwarvish letters back home: come on, everyone, and bring the ketchup."
Author: Terry Pratchett

16. "You see," said Colon, "thieves are organized here. I mean, it's official. They're allowed a certain amount of thieving. Not that they do much these days, mind you. If you pay them a little premium every year they give you a card and leave you alone. Saves time and effort all around.""And all thieves are members?" said Angua."Oh, yes," said Carrot. "Can't go thieving in Ankh-Morpork without a Guild permit. Not unless you've got a special talent.""Why? What happens? What talent?" she said."Well, being able to survive being hung upside down from one of the gates with your ears nailed to your knees," said Carrot."
Author: Terry Pratchett

17. "The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork sat back on his austere chair with the sudden bright smile of a very busy person at the end of a crowded day who's suddenly found in his schedule a reminder saying: 7.00-7.05, Be Cheerful and Relaxed and a People Person."
Author: Terry Pratchett

18. "Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict.Strappi stared at him in rage that was incoherent until he managed to touch bottom again. 'Ankh-Morpork is a godawful city', he recovered."
Author: Terry Pratchett

19. "According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles."
Author: Terry Pratchett

20. "Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc."
Author: Terry Pratchett

21. "Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it's the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it's just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let's just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound."
Author: Terry Pratchett

22. "The people of Ankh-Morpork had a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to entertainment, and while they were looking forward to seeing a dragon slain, they'd be happy to settle instead for seeing someone being baked alive in his own armour. You didn't get the chance every day to see someone baked alive in their own armour. It would be something for the children to remember."
Author: Terry Pratchett

23. "In a well-organized world he might have landed on a fire escape, but the fire escapes were unknown in Ankh-Morpork and the flames generally had to leave via the roof."
Author: Terry Pratchett

24. "If the Creator had said, "Let there be light" in Ankh-Morpork, he'd have got no further because of all the people saying "What colour?"
Author: Terry Pratchett

25. "The commander went, as they say in Ankh-Morpork, totally Librarian on them."
Author: Terry Pratchett

26. "Sergeant Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Guard was on duty. He was guarding the Brass Bridge, the main link between Ankh and Morpork. From theft.When it came to crime prevention, Sergeant Colon found it safest to think big."
Author: Terry Pratchett

27. "There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell."
Author: Terry Pratchett

28. "When the humours were handed out, Ankh-Morpork got the one for joking and Quirm had to do make do with their expertise in fine dining and love-making."
Author: Terry Pratchett

29. "This was, after all, Ankh-Morpork, where a man walked free even if he was not, strictly speaking, a man."
Author: Terry Pratchett

30. "Hay quienes afirman que en Ankh-Morpork una vida no vale nada. No pueden estar más equivocados, naturalmente, ya que el precio de una vida no para de subir. Morir, en cambio, no te costará una moneda."
Author: Terry Pratchett

Morpork Quotes Pictures