"Science fiction is out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!"

"The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football."

"Humans need fantasy to be human."

"Then he kept to the back streets, and found a place that did a very reasonable double sausage, egg, bacon and fried slice, in the hope that food could replace sleep."

"Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."

"It was the kind of storm that suggests the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic."

"She'd struck Esk once before " the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life."

"Might have just been an innocent bystander, sir,' said Carrot'What, in Ankh-Morpork?'Yes, sir.''We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value."

"We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it."

"Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn't do good for people, she did right by them."

"Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?"

"IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT /MEANT/ TO BE SAFE."

"Why us?" he said. "Why is it happening to us?"Everything has to happen to someone," said Ginger."

"That was messages without meaning: telepathy without brains."

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."

"And Dil was realizing that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed anymore."

"This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here."

"Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no."

"It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus."

"I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated."

"Ye mustn't be afraid to ask for help. Pride is a good thing, my girl, but it will kill you in time."

"The fastest way to travel is to be there already."

"Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees."

"Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should."

"It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing."

"I dinna want to disappoint ye, but we's in a cellar right here, and it's full o' tatties.'After a while a voice said: 'So where izzit?''Maybe it's got the day off?''What's a demon need a day off for?''Tae gae an' see its ol' mam an' dad, mebbe?''Oh, aye? Demons have mams, do they?"

"Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces."

"OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death. OTHERWISE, WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?"

"In my experience, what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid."

"Why are our people going out there, said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves' Guild.Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and additional wealth I na new land, said Lord Vetinari."What's in it for the Klatchians? said Lord Downey."Oh, they've gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern, said Lord Vetinari."A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord, said Mr. Burleigh. The Patrician looked down again at his notes. "Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order."

"I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins."

"Witches just aren't like that, said Magrat. "We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it's wicked of them to say we don't. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead."The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration. She blushed, although not greenly, and looked at her knees."Goodie Whemper did a recipe, she confessed. "It's quite easy. What you do is, you get some lead, and you-"I don't think that would be appropriate, said Granny carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. "It could give people the wrong idea."But not for long, said Nanny wistfully."

"There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!" But he didn't, because if he had said any of those things then he'd have known that what he had just done was murder."

"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad."

"She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need."

"I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?"

"YOU FEAR TO DIE?"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break..."

"Never ask the tight-rope walker how he keeps his balance. if he stops to think about it, he falls off."

"I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN."

"Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself."

"They are tragic,' said Vetinari, 'and we laugh at their tragedy as we laugh at our own. The painted grin leers out at us from the darkness, mocking our insane belief in order, logic, status, the reality of reality. The mask knows that we are born on the banana skin that leads only to the open manhole cover of doom, and all we can hope for are the cheers of the crowd."

"A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing."

"How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don't know how to use it?'Not me, sir. Other people. They see the sword and don't attack me,' said Maladict patiently.Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn't be any good with it,' said the sergeant.No, sir. I'd probably settle for just ripping their heads off, sir. That's what I mean by protection, sir. Theirs, not mine. And I'd get hell from the League if I did that, sir."

"Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls."

"Once you were in the hands of a Grand Vizier, you were dead. Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: "Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister."

"I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer."

"Learnin' how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them."

"Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human."

"YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES."So we can believe the big ones?"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING."

"Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you."