"Amazin'.' he said again. 'He just looks as though he's thinking, right?''Er...yes.''But he's not actually thinking?''Er...no.''So...he just gives the impression of thinking but really it's just a show?''Er...yes.'Just like everyone else, then really,' said Ridcully."

"It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane."

"It's still magic even if you know how it's done."

"Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old."

"After all, if you can't trust governments, whom can you trust?"

"Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you."

"Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things."

"Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn't trust it. Often you couldn't even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else-coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer."

"He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus."

"There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony."

"Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze."

"If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life."

"The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you've got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You've got to stop. You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home."

"Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict. city', he recovered."

"You're saying,' he said, weighing each word, 'that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle."

"Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things."

"It's bad enough barging into Guild property, but we'll get into really serious trouble if we shoot anyone. Lord Vetinari won't stop at sarcasm. He might use' - Colon swallowed - 'irony."

"The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed."

"A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

"Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!"

"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god)."

"Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

"I kill in my own time, he said. "In any case, killing unconscious people isn't right."I can't think of a more opportune time, said the Loremaster."

"I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have."

"But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg."

"You won't enjoy it," sighed Crowley. "It's been in the car for more than a fortnight." A heavy bass beat began to thump through the Bentley as they sped past Heathrow. Aziraphale's brow furrowed. "I don't recognize this," he said. "What is it?" "It's Tchaikovsky's 'Another One Bites the Dust'," said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough. To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd's "We Are the Champions" and Beethoven's "I Want To Break Free." Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams's "Fat-Bottomed Girls."

"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."

"Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them."

"Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off the dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing lacked style and anyway was bad for business, habit-forming and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least they could tell the people he was their fault."

"The only thing more dangerous then a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency..."

"To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist."

"He grinned. It was the sort of grin that Agnes supposed was called infectious but, then, so was measles."

"Haven't you got any romance in your soul?' said Magrat plaintively. 'No,' said Granny. 'I ain't. And stars don't care what you wish, and magic don't make things better, and no one doesn't get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What's real, what's not real, and what's the difference."

"The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things."

"It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple."

"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."

"I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow."

"There are some laws that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space."

"Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate."

"Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sargent Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting."

"Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death."

"Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement."

"The gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows."

"Susan's gotta poker, you know," it said, as if anxious to be helpful. WELL, WELL. INDEED. MY GOODNESS ME. week she picked up a bogey by its nose."Death tried to imagine this. He felt sure he'd heard the sentence wrong, but it didn't sound a whole lot better however he rearranged the words."

"Well, the lion is a big ol' coward, mostly. If you want trouble, you want to tangle with the lioness. They're killers, and they hunt together. It's the same everywhere. If you want big grief, look to the ladies."

"Its like people care more abput their pride than about what's correct, about the truth."

"The public thinks big, sensible, measured thoughts while people run around doing silly things."

"People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter."

"WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN."

"When in doubt, choose to live."