Terry Pratchett Quotes

Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.

If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

I think irrationality is one of the scariest things in the world.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

The world is enormously dangerous and scary. I worry very much for my daughter. I'm not sure we're in control any more, and I think the Internet is partly responsible for that.

Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

I myself am an absolute abyss.

Life is a sleazy stranger, who looks vaguely familiar; flirting with a bimbo named disaster at the end of the bar.

But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!

Under every deep a lower deep opens.

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.

The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.

Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.

A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice.

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.