Biography lends to death a new terror.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

I’m not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

All art is quite useless.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

It is easier to be critical than correct.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

Death is a fearful thing.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

It is natural to die as to be born.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

I spend a lot of time reading.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.