"It's supposed to be jolly, with mistletoe and holly... and other things ending in olly."

"Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done."

"He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there."

"Probably went swimming and got eaten by a pineapple."

"The neck in front of her came up. The head swivelled 180 degrees and the horse looked at Kin with bright insectile eyes.'YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,' it said inside Kin's head.'Hell!''THOSE ARE NOT MEANINGFUL CO-ORDINATES."

"Reality so often fails when it comes to small, satisfying details, she thought."

"Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring."

"This book had two authors, and they were both the same person."

"It's witchcraft with all the crusts cut off, and real witchcraft is ALL crusts."

"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."

"Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to."

"We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork."

"It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ (Lit.: 'Thing-ies') or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five 'flavours', known as 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'sex appeal' and 'peppermint'."

"Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em."

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."

"And that's what I don't like about magic, Captain. 'cos it's *magic*. You can't ask questions, it's magic. It doesn't explain anything, it's magic. You don't know where it comes from, it's magic! That's what I don't like about magic, it does everything by magic!"

"Hello, inner child, I'm the inner babysitter!"

"Igor?' said Moist. 'You have an Igor?'Oh, yes,' said Hubert. 'That's how I get this wonderful light. They know the secret of storing lightning in jars! But don't let that worry you, Mr Lipspick. Just because I'm employing an Igor and working in a cellar doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman, ha ha ha!'Ha ha,' agreed Moist.Ha hah hah!,' said Hubert. 'Hahahahahaha!! Ahahahahahahhhhh!!!!!-'Bent slapped him on the back. Hubert coughed.Sorry about that, it's the air down here,' he mumbled."

"Daphne's thought in Nation: This was no time to go totally mad. You had to maintain standards."

"There's no point in believing in things that exist."

"And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate."

"Fire is easy to work with if you keep your mind clear, but pain . . . pain fights back. Pain is alive. Pain is the enemy."

"She had heard it said that, before you could understand anybody, you needed to walk a mile in their shoes, which did not make a whole lot of sense, because probably AFTER you had walked a mile in their shoes, you would understand that they were chasing you and accusing you of the theft of a pair of shoes--although, of course, you could probably outrun them, owing to their lack of footwear."

"What is magic?There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day."

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

"It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long."

"Wizards don't believe in gods. They didn't deny their existence, of course. They just didn't believe. It was nothing personal; they weren't actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made things work, that gave the world its purpose. It was just that they were best avoided close up."

"The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out."

"Tiffany has been apprenticing as a witch by visiting people in need with her mentor. After meeting with one particularly sad case, she tells her mentor, "It shouldn't be like this." Her mentor replies, "There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do."

"Yes, but humans are more important than animals,' said Brutha.'This is a point of view often expressed by humans,' said Om."

"You couldn't escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat."

"That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next."

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

"I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel."

"Gossiping's part of witchcraft,' said Tiffany. 'They're checking to see if they've gone batty yet."

"Of course, to be fair, that was a parent's job. The world was so full of sharp bends that if they didn't put a few twists in you, you wouldn't stand a chance of fitting in."

"I am not so blind that I can't see darkness."

"You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant... If I don't help them, who will?"

"Susan stared at him.The blue glow in Death's eyes gradually faded, and as the light died it sucked at her gaze so that it was dragged into the eye sockets and into the darkness beyond, which went on and on, for ever. There was no word for it. Even eternity was a human idea. Giving it a name gave it a length; admittedly, a very long one. But this darkness was what was left when eternity had given up. It was where Death lived. Alone."

"Then Carrot said, "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, captain. That's what they say."What?" Vimes' sudden rage was like a thunderclap. "Who says that? When has that ever been true? It's never been true! It's the kind of thing people without power say to make it all seem less bloody awful, but it's just words, it never makes any difference."

"I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once."

"The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks."

"He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human-human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls - the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress."

"Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom."

"It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong."

"Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist."

"How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort.IN PAIRS."

"Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not."

"His voice gave out and he made several wavy motions with his hand, indicative of the shape of a woman who would probably be unable to keep her balance."

"Just to keep the bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death."