Terry Pratchett Hero Quotations

Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals

Steal five dollars and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero.

Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.

I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.

Colon has always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them go out and die famously for god, country and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made. It had never occurred to him that they might do it because they'd get yelled at if they didn't.

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

If he'd been a hero, he would have taken the opportunity to say, "That's what I call sorted!" Since he wasn't a hero, he threw up.

No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

...the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe.