Hogfather Quotes

The guard was cowering behind an overturned cabinet. He cringed back as Teatime stepped over it. "hat're you doing here?" he shouted. "Who are you?"

"Ah, I'm glad you asked. I'm your worst nightmare!" said Teatime cheerfully.

The man shuddered.

"You mean...the one with the giant cabbage and the sort of whirring knife thing?"

"Sorry?" Teatime looked momentarily nonplussed.

"Then you're the one about where I'm falling, only instead of ground underneath it's al--"

"No, in fact I'm--"

The guard sagged. "Awww, not the one where there's this door only there's no floor beyond it and then there's these claws--"

"No," said Teatime. "Not that one." He withdrew a dagger from his sleeve. "i'm the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you stone dead."

The Guard grinned with relief. "Oh, that one, he said. "But that one's not very--"

He crumpled around Teatime's suddenly out-thurst fist. And then, just as the others had done, he faded.

"Rather a charitable act there, I feel," Teatime said as the man vanished. "But it is nearly Hogswatch, after all."

HOGFATHER

Everything starts somehwere, although many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problems with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spellings of words.

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If its all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isnt then you've lost nothing right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...".

Hogswatch was traditionally supposed to be a time for families, but the people who drank in Biers didnt have families; some of them looked as though they might have had litters, or clutches.

The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way that the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.

Ignorant: A state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the 70 almost identical looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to navigate across a 1000 miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, and other such trivial matters.
Credulous: Having views about the world, the universe, and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

Its amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters. One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it.
Representatives of several hundred space-going races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be abductees.
The planet Earth is now banned to all alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they gave actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one ?- who is big, hairy, and has very large feet.
The truth is out there, but lies are in your head.

He gave Susan the stern look of one who, if it was not for the fact that the world needed him, would even now by tiring of painting naked young ladies on some tropical island somewhere.

It was not technically audible, but nevertheless Susan could hear the wizard's mind back-pedalling. Up ahead was the conclusion that Teatime had no time for people he didnt need.

YOU MAY ASWELL KNOW THIS. DOWN IN THE DEEPEST KINGDOM OF THE SEA, WHERE THERE IS NO LIGHT, THERE LIVES A TYPE OF CREATURE WITH NO BRAIN, NO EYES AND NO MOUTH. IT DOES NOTHING BUT LIVE AND PUT FORTH PETALS OF PERFECT CRIMSON WHERE NONE ARE THERE TO SEE. IT IS NOTHING EXCEPT A TINY yes IN THE NIGHT. AND YET... IT HAS ENEMIES THAT BEAR IT A VICIOUS, UNBENDING MALICE, WHO WISH NOT ONLY FOR ITS TINY LIFE TO BE OVER BUT ALSO THAT IT HAD NEVER EXISTED. ARE YOU WITH ME SO FAR?
"Well, yes, but - "
"GOOD, NOW, IMAGINE WHAT THEY THINK OF *HUMANITY*.

"I dont actually think," Ponder Stibbons said gloomily, "that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just dont think I want to live in that kind of world."
"Er, you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled."

AND WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR HOGWATCH, SMALL HUMAN?
- Death

"Here's a tip, though. Just 'Ho, Ho, Ho' will do. Dont say 'Cower, brief mortals'."
- Albert advises Death on how to be the Hogfather

"You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
"NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE."
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"
"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES."
"So we can believe the big ones?"
"YES. JUSTICE. DUTY. MERCY. THAT SORT OF THING."
"They're not the same at all!"
"REALLY? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET YOU ACT, LIKE THERE WAS SOME SORT OF RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
- Susan and Death