Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Pratchett

Pratchett opens with a tidy self-help platitude, then punctures it with a needle labeled “physicists,” turning comforting certainty into a joke about how reality refuses to cooperate with our slogans. The line works because it’s structured like a trap: you relax into “Everything starts somewhere” (a phrase that reassures you that origins are traceable, narratives are coherent, and effort yields results), and then he yanks the rug with a sideways glance at cosmology, quantum weirdness, and the headache of defining a “start” at all.

The specific intent isn’t to dunk on science; it’s to lampoon our craving for clean beginnings. Physicists “disagree” not because they’re contrarian, but because modern physics makes “somewhere” and “starts” slippery. In Pratchett’s world, that slipperiness is the point: people build meaning by pretending the universe has story structure, while the universe keeps improvising. The humor is also a cultural critique of authority. We invoke “physicists” as high priests of the real, yet even they can’t provide the comforting origin myth the sentence begins with.

Context matters: Pratchett’s Discworld repeatedly stages collisions between human narrative instinct (heroes, quests, destiny) and messy material systems (economies, institutions, entropy). This quip is Discworld in miniature: an aphorism that wants to be wise, sabotaged by the reminder that the deepest experts can’t agree on the first chapter. It’s cynicism with a wink, and a warning: your neat beginning is probably a story you’re telling yourself.