"Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother."

"The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it."

"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head."

"It was raining in the small, mountainous country of Llamedos. It was always raining in Llamedos. Rain was the country's main export. It had rain mines."

"When Geoffrey was away, the goat often took himself off. He had soon got the goats at Granny's cottage doing his bidding, and Nanny Ogg said once that she had seen what she called 'that devil goat' sitting in the middle of a circle of feral goats up in the hills. She named him 'The Mince of Darkness' because of his small and twinkling hooves, and added, 'Not that I don't like him, stinky as he is. I've always been one for the horns, as you might say. Goats is clever. Sheep ain't. No offence, my dear."

"It tells him what to say. I know it sounds ridiculous, muttered Hugh."How can a book tell a man what to say?"

"But is all this true?" said Brutha.Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork."You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha."I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about."

"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."

"Too much alleged 'fantasy' is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off."

"The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led."

"But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."

"Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?Very nearly everyone, come to think of it..."

"He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there."

"Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book."

"Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?"Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir."

"History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders."

"You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!'IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.'She's a child!' shouted Crumley.IT'S EDUCATIONAL.'What if she cuts herself?'THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON."

"An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one - black clothes, hood, boots, and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?"

"Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can.People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way."

"First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft."

"Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism."

"What have I always believed?That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right."

"She is standing just behind you. Just behind your right shoulder."In the silence of the woods, Polly turned."I can't see her," she said."I am happy for you," said Wazzer, handing her the empty mug."But I didn't see anything," said Polly."No," said Wazzer. "But you turned around..."

"People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins."

"But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance."

"The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to."

"To be frank, I find religion rather offensive."

"Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice -- i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the world for it."

"Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words."

"The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee."

"What some people need," said Magrat, to the world in general, "is a bit more heart."What some people need," said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, "is a lot more brain."Then she clutched at her hat to stop the wind from blowing i."

"It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free."

"You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree."One of the giants grinned at him.Druellae snorted. "Stupid! Where do you think acorns come from?"

"Could I please amend that suggestion? Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?"

"Yes, sir, but the Librarian likes bananas, sir."Very nourishin' fruit, Mr Stibbons."Yes, sir. Although, funnily enough it's not actually a fruit, sir."Really?"Yes, sir. Botanically, it's a type of fish, sir. According to my theory it's cladistically associated with the Krullian pipefish, sir, which of course is also yellow and goes around in bunches or shoals."And lives in trees?"Well, not usually, sir. The banana is obviously exploiting a new niche."Good heavens, really? It's a funny thing, but I've never much liked bananas and I've always been a bit suspicious of fish, too. That'd explain it."

"If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander."

"I don't reckon it's allowed, going round setting fire to people, said Adam. "Otherwise people'd be doin' it all the time."It's all right if you're religious, said Brian reassuringly. "And it stops the witches from goin' to Hell, so I expect they'd be quite grateful if they understood it properly."

"He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless."

"Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

"I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people."

"Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough."

"Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground are important. Fantasy peoples the alien Outside, and it doesn't matter a whole lot if it peoples it with good guys or bad guys. Putting 'Hy-Brasil' on the map is a step in the right direction, but if you can't manage that, then 'Here Be Dragons is better than nothing. Better than the void."

"As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo that'd just hopped away."

"Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight."

"We're on a mission from Glod."

"And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things."

"I don't think it's weak to admit you made a mistake. That takes strength, if you ask me."

"I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"Death thought about it.CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE."

"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."

"There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having."