Moving Pictures Quotes
"Watch… This is space. It’s sometimes called the final frontier."
"Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something gradual."
"The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist."
"Nothing but the sand had changed here in hundreds of years."
"Either your clothes died when you did, or maybe you just mentally dressed yourself from force of habit."
"It would be wrong to say a look of panic passed across Deccan Ribobe’s face, because at that moment it was several yards away and wearing a sort of fixed grin, as if it had seen the joke at last."
"There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities."
"Citizens hate living there and, if they have to move away on business or adventure or, more usually, until some statute of limitations runs out, can’t wait to get back so they can enjoy hating living there some more."
"And then he got up at five o’clock to go duck hunting down in the marshes on the estuary."
"People who didn’t apply themselves to the facts in hand might have thought that Victor Tugelbend would be fat and unhealthy. In fact, he was undoubtedly the most athletically-inclined student in the University."
"Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and he kept himself in trim because doing things with decent muscles was far less effort than trying to achieve things with bags of flab."
"He’s got a knife, Victor thought. He’s coming at me with a knife. That means I’m either going to get stabbed or I’m going to have to run away, which is a real waste of energy."
"Not lead, lad. Light. It doesn’t work with lead. Light into gold..."
"You have to see ’em all at once, or something."
"It wasn’t that the dog had gone "woof!," although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe never went "woof!," they had complicated barks like "whuuugh!" and "hwhoouf!" No, it was that it hadn’t in fact barked at all. It had said "woof.""
"As a city, it had some of the most accomplished spectators in the universe. They’d watch anything, especially if there was any possibility of anyone getting hurt in an amusing way."
"It’s very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures."
"I don’t know if I’d be any good at acting, though," Victor confessed."
"What do you do? I’m studying to be a w—," Victor began. He remembered Silverfish’s antipathy toward wizardry, and corrected himself, "a clerk."
"I’m sorry, Mr. Silverfish," Victor pleaded. "I’m really not that kind of person but you did say and I’ve walked all this way and I haven’t got any money and I’m hungry and I’ll do anything you’ve got. Anything at all. Please."
"You want to know how things work? You see, most people are so disappointing. You show them something really wonderful like the picture box, and they just go ‘oh.’ They never ask how it works."
"You listen to the street traders any morning. They don’t shout, ‘Nearly-fresh oranges, only slightly squashy, reasonable value,’ do they? No, they shout, ‘Git chore orinjes, they’re luvverly.’ Good business sense."
"Seems to me that you could do with some of that around here."
"And with the money, you could really get on with perfecting your art."
"Good. That means they’ll have all afternoon to find two of them who look just like us."
"Chances are where you find them, I’ve always said."
"What, you mean like dwarfs and gnomes and so on?"
"They want dancing girls! They want thrills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!"
"We ain’t allowed to kill you. They stops our money if we does things like that."
"Because there aren’t so many trolls wanting to make moving pictures."
"You can’t build a career on Holy Wood. That’s like building a house on a swamp."
"Every time I see a cow’s arse, I’ll think of you!"
"Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people."
"You think you’ve got problems," said the cat. "I’m reduced to eating fish. You put a paw on your dinner, it shouts ‘Help!’, you got a major predicament."
"You don’t think you really belong to yourself, right? You’ve had the feeling that something else is doing your thinking for you?"
"Everyone around Dibbler wore them after a while."
"Perhaps they start out straight and go bendy with use. A lot of things do."
"You’d be amazed at what girls have to do for a lot less than ten dollars a day."
"When you want to go forward you swear at it and hit it with a stick, and when you want to stop you swear at it and really hit it with a stick."
"It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at."
"It’s like a big bubbling stew but this time different ingredients float to the top."
"Suddenly there’s all these new things for people to do."
"It’s as though we’re being slotted in. You think we’re using Holy Wood, but Holy Wood is using us."
"A thousand elephants. I wonder what they want them for?"
"Magic for ordinary people, Silverfish had called it."
"And what did the handlemen do before they had handles to turn?"
"Holy Wood’s really doing things for ordinary people. Silver screen magic."
"Pedigree? What's a pedigree? It's just breeding."
"I’m the one Holy Wood called," Gaspode muttered, in a self-pitying voice.
"Well, look, maybe you weren’t called to Holy Wood to be a wonder dog," said Victor. "Maybe it’s got something else in mind for you."
"You’d be amazed, the stuff you see and hear when you’re a dog. I didn’t know what any of it meant at the time, of course. Now I do."
"Magic wasn’t difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque edifice of wizardry had been set up to conceal."
"For example, in the Agatean language the signs for ‘woman’ and ‘slave’ written down together actually mean ‘wife.’"
"I reckon ten percent is very fair. Very fair, in the circumstances."
"We’re poor li’l lambs, wot have loorst our way…"
"You’d get these guys whorin’ and drinkin’ and carryin’ on regardless their whole life, and then when the old Grim Reaper starts sharpenin’ his scythe they suddenly becomes all pious."
"It’s not right, you being alone in a lady’s boodwah."
"You just get one chance, you live for maybe seventy years, and if you’re lucky you get one chance."
"Fate don’t like it when people take up more space than they ought to. Everyone knows that."
"Ambition wasn’t magical. Powerful, yes, but not magical…surely?"
"It wasn’t an uncommon legend... There had been a city once, in the mists of pre-history—bigger than Ankh-Morpork, if that were possible."
"You could make a dog out of a wolf, but you couldn’t take the wolf out of a dog."
"When the hardpad was acting up and the fleas were feisty and acting full of plumptiousness, it was a comforting thought."
"True dogs didn’t go around going mad with pleasure just because a human said something to them."
"I hateth fisth, but at leasth they don’t talk back."
"Give me a boot every time. You know where you stand, with a boot."
"This was the one they’d have to look up to! That was the Moving Picture to End all Moving Pictures!"
"The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up... A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness."
"It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you."
"Because Mr. Dibbler is a very observant man."
"Frankly, I don’t give a damn," he said, "and he strode off toward the set."
"He’d never done anything like this before, but he knew he was doing it right."
"Now, all he had to do was take it into N’kouf and see if the merchant—"
"Something that both Dibblers were agreed on was that, if they’d been in charge, no one would have been able to get away with such a low-grade war."
"Because I’m your own flesh and blood," said Soll.
"This is Holy Wood. To pass the time quickly, you just film the clock hands moving fast…"
"You mean it’s all a trick?" he said, astonished.
"The whole of life is just like watching a click."
"What you thinking of? You eat people, everyone laugh at you, say, ‘He very defective troll, do not know how to behave in polite society'."
"And now we get out of here fast," said Rock. "This whole ceiling looking very defective to me. Could go at any time."
"It's over. Can you make the sleepwalking part of you understand that? It's no good trying to get in anymore, there isn't any way. It's buried. It's over. Thank goodness."
"It’s a bar for the derelict and the unlucky and all of those people who have been temporarily flagged off the racetrack of life and into the pits."
"I created it," said Silverfish, morosely. "I thought it would be educational. It could broaden people’s horizons."
"What do you get, right, what do you get if, you cross…a mountain with an elephant?"
"It’s just what you wanted. We’re us, just as big as we can be."
"I’ve never trusted those grubby-handed bastards! They’re not like us, you know. They’ve got no idea of proper dignity!"
"An inviolable rule about buildings for the showing of moving pictures, applicable throughout the multiverse, is that the ghastliness of the architecture around the back is inversely proportional to the gloriousness of the architecture in the front."
"There’s no reason at all why we should have to do this."
"We should have changed something into money. Just a quick illusion. Where’s the harm in that?"
"Old I am, mm, and daft I may be, but I ain’t goin’ to be hungry."
"You could become famous just for being, well, famous."
"It’s not like that with the moving pictures."
"Reality didn’t have to be real. Maybe if conditions were right, it just had to be what people believed..."
"Time slowed. The air took on a purple haze. Death swung his scythe."
"'Careful,' said the Dean. 'That is not dead which can eternal lie.'"
"A fifty-foot monster fell on you," said the Dean, simply."
"'Twas beauty killed the beast," said the Dean."
"Everything has to happen to someone," said Ginger.
"Just when you need to save the world, there's a world for you to save," said Ginger.
"We need someone to remember Holy Wood really well."