I genuinely love how this man wrote the most effortlessly, breathtakingly universal truths I've ever read and then will just...dad joke all over the place.
"A sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. That's what sin is."
"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters."
Breathtaking. Life altering. Simple words given to the most complex facets of human existence.
"Tiffany [Aching] was Aching all over"
“A -ing wizard. I HATE -ing wizards!” “You shouldn’t - them, then”‘ muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes."
"It was gilt by association"
“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
“There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.”
The one-two punch of something like...
“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck"
...and then the utter, truthful, poetic simplicity of...
"When in doubt, choose to live.”
Not many writers ever manage to swing so fully between the poles of absurdity and veracity with such success on both ends of the spectrum. What a gift he was and is to all of us.