Quotes & Sayings About Good Omens

You think wars get started because some duke gets shot, or someone cuts off one's ear, or someone's sited their missiles in the wrong place. It's not like that. That's just well, just reasons, which haven't got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can't stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all. — Terry Pratchett

But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat. — Terry Pratchett

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that. — Neil Gaiman

You see a wile, you thwart. Am I right? — Terry Pratchett

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. — Terry Pratchett

The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear. — Jerry Saltz

Having a baby is the single mos joyous co-experience that two human beings can share, and he wasn't going to miss a second of it.
He got one of the Secret Service men to videotape it for him. — Terry Pratchett

- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens) — Terry Pratchett

Adam looked at Them. They were his kind of people, too.
You just had to decide who your friends really were. — Terry Pratchett

Good Omens was written by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them. They weren't even certain it would sell. — Terry Pratchett

It'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another. — Terry Pratchett

A skeleton, even a walking one, is at least human; Death of a sort lurks inside every living creature. — Terry Pratchett

I bet you don't have to be Spanish to be the Spanish Inquisition," said Adam. "I bet it's like Scottish eggs or American hamburgers. It just has to look Spanish. We've just got to make it look Spanish. Then everyone would know it's the Spanish Inquisition. — Terry Pratchett

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.
That would do it every time. — Terry Pratchett

Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens. — Baruch Spinoza

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, - 'Aye,' asked he again, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?' And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by. — Francis Bacon

She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened," said Anathema. "Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972. — Terry Pratchett

A good thing? Or a strong omen ... Only time would tell what these newfangled neutrons and fission reactions would give to our ever-changing world.In all probability,this new scientific birth would change all of our lives forever and perhaps end the brutal war we were now engaged in? — Will Leamon

The evening pulsed with omens gentle to the eyes, and Valentina had a romantic crush on it all, like every good witch should. — Lawren Leo

You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you make it right. — Terry Pratchett

I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in men's minds, perhaps from a lack of a willingness to feel themselves utterly alone. But now and then I feel that there is something beyond the material world, somethings we all feel intimations of but cannot explain. Underneath the religious vision there is the harsh fundamental reality of all our lives, because we know we must live and die as the animals we are. But sometimes I suspect that under that harsh reality there is a further vision, still deeper based, that comes nearer to true reality than the reality we know. — Winston Graham

One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either. — Terry Pratchett

It just wasn't supposed to end like this." She looks at me with red-rimmed eyes and yellow skin. Colors should be a good thing, but now, they're marks, omens of bad tidings. "I was supposed to grow up, go to college, get a job," she continues in that gut-clenching croak. "Meet my dream guy, marry, have k-kids. You were going to live next door and we would grow old in the same nursing home. Chuck oatmeal at each other and watch soap operas all day in our rocking chairs. That was my daydream. My perfect life. I don't want to keep asking myself why until the end, but ... " A lone tear trails down her sunken cheek. This time I don't reach out to wipe the water away; I let it go. Down, down, until it drips off the side of her jaw. This is humanity. This is life and death in one room. — Kelsey Sutton

Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever. — Terry Pratchett

His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47. — Terry Pratchett

The International Express man couldn't understand it. I mean, in the old days, and it wasn't that long ago really, there had been an angler every dozen yards along the bank; children had played there; courting couples had come to listen to the splish and gurgle of the river, and to hold hands, and to get all lovey-dovey in the Sussex sunset. He'd done that with Maud, his missus, before they were married. They'd come here to spoon and, on one memorable occasion, fork."
From "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman. — Terry Pratchett

Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. — Terry Pratchett

I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out. — Terry Pratchett

One of the nice things about time, Crowley always said, was that it was steadily taking him further away from the fourteenth century. — Jill Thompson

It is possibly worth mentioning at this point that Mr. Young thought that paparazzi was a kind of Italian linoleum. — Terry Pratchett

He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba. — Terry Pratchett