The best quotes you'll read today, courtesy Terry Pratchett (with a Discworld read order guide for when you finish Game of Thrones and need a fantasy fix)

First, here's a basic reading order guide I made for the series.

The series being Terry Pratchett's incredible Discworld, a 41-book series (and a few short stories and novellas) set in a remarkable fantasy universe. This guide Includes corrections for mistakes on the official guide, as well as further detail not available on other (very nicely done) unofficial guides.

Good for those who want to theme their reads by subseries, and those who just want to read chronologically.

PM me if you want a lossless high-res version. (I accidentally deleted the last one, my bad.)

What sets Discworld apart?

Besides the fact that this is the author?

The series takes place on a flat world perched on the back of four elephants, with stand on the back of the world turtle, Great A'tuin. As a whole series, it tells the story of a magical universe coming to terms with the dawning of the age of industry and technology.

More importantly, this is a series that will make you laugh out loud with joy and marvel at the author's lightning wit and wordplay...and then send an emotional or philosophical uppercut to the jaw when you're not expecting it.

Some of the best characterization in all of fantasy lives in these books. They're nothing like your Tolkiens or Martins...but the world is complex and alive.

How do I read these books? And what about these 'young adult' novels in the series?

You can read from the beginning (follow the chronological ring in this guide), although you should be aware that the tone of the series changes markedly as it progresses. Pratchett himself suggests not reading from the first book but starting elsewhere.

There are also a number of wonderful standalones, such as the above book. New readers to Pratchett often question whether the young adult novels in the series, the Tiffany Aching books and the above Amazing Maurice, are worth reading.

Discworld readers will generally tell you that they're some of the best in the series, and in fact they often go to darker, more disturbing places than you might expect. (Shameless insert of my crappy amateur art for this book, sorry).

So how about some quotes?

"'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.'

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—'

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

'So we can believe the big ones?'

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

'They're not the same at all!'

YOU THINK SO? 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—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

'Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—'

MY POINT EXACTLY.'"

(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather; art credit: the fantastic Stephen Player. Check him out at: http://www.playergallery.com/)

"'I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,' said the man.

'You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.'

He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window.

'A great rolling sea of evil,' he said, almost proprietorially. 'Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!' He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.

'Down there,' he said, 'are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,' he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, 'but you fellows really need us.'

'Yes, sir?' said Vimes quietly.

'Oh, yes. We’re the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.'"

(Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!; art credit: Stephen Player. http://www.playergallery.com/)

And now for a change of pace...

More at http://adidraws.tumblr.com/post/105778023917/how-i-made-its-a-sword-theyre-not-meant-to-be.

"It had started with The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales...

Actually, it had probably started with a lot of things, but the stories most of all.

Her mother had read them to her when she was little, and then she’d read them to herself. And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch.

And Tiffany had thought, Where’s the evidence?

The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you had no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch.

If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about 'a handsome prince'…was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for 'a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long'…well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told.'"

(Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men; art credit: Stephen Player. http://www.playergallery.com/)

"IT'S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE, said the Hogfather.

'You mean the sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?'

YES. NOW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF."

(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather; art credit: Stephen Player. http://www.playergallery.com/)

"FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST...

IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.

Death took a step backwards.

It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features.

Death glanced sideways at the servants.

LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?”

(Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man; art credit: Stephen Player. http://www.playergallery.com/)

"'There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,' said Oats.

'And what do they think? Against it, are they?' said Granny Weatherwax.

'It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.'

'Nope.'

'Pardon?'

'There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.'

'It’s a lot more complicated than that—'
'No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.'

'Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—'

'But they starts with thinking about people as things…'

(Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum; art credit: Stephen Player. http://www.playergallery.com/)

"The city beyond was dark again, with only the occasional chink of light from a shuttered window...

By comparison, the streets of the Republic were ablaze.

In a few hours, the shops out there were expecting deliveries, and they weren’t going to arrive. A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times.

Every day maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork. So did a flock of sheep and a herd of pigs, and the gods alone knew how many ducks, chickens, and geese. Flour? He’d heard it was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes, and maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn’t particularly want to know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out the everlasting traffic problem, these were the kind of facts that got handed to you.

Every day, forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. Every day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives and eels and lobsters. And then think of the horses dragging this stuff, and the windmills … and the wool coming in, too, every day, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY DAMN DAY …

Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city.

A lot of the stuff came in through the Onion Gate and the Shambling Gate, both now Republican and solidly locked. There’d be a military picket on them, surely. Right now, there were carts on the way that’d find those gates closed to them. Yet, no matter what the politics, eggs hatch, and milk sours, and herds of driven animals need penning and watering, and where was all that going to happen? Would the military sort it out? Well, would they? While the carts rumbled up, and then were hemmed in by the carts behind, and the pigs escaped, and the cattle herds wandered off?

Was anyone important thinking about this?"

(Terry Pratchett, Night Watch)

"'I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again,...

...but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'"

(Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals; art credit: Stephen Player. http://www.playergallery.com/)

Give these books a read! Or check them out in audiobook form: they're absolutely top-notch.