"They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever."

"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

"Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast."

"When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth."

"Maladict had hallucinations, but Wazzer had a certainty you could bend steel around. It was the opposite of a hallucination, somehow. It was as if she could see what was real and you couldn't."

"Anger was a weapon to be honed and treasured and used only at the moment yielding most premium."

"There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this."

"The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys."

"No it's not!" said Constable Visit. "Atheism is a denial of a god."Therefore It Is A Religious Position," said Dorfl. "Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms of Denial. Therefore, Atheism Is A Form Of Belief. If The Atheist Truly Did Not Believe, He Or She Would Not Bother To Deny."

"I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset cos' they act like people", said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive."

"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it."

"And although the space they occupy isn't like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon."

"It was a Guild of Assassins, after all. Black was what you wore. The night was black and so were you. And black had such style, and an Assassin without style, everyone agreed, was just a highly paid arrogant thug."

"THERE IS NO JUSTICE" said Death "JUST ME."

"He said to people: you're free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he'd been betrayed, they milled around a bit like barn-bred chickens who've seen the big world outside for the first time, and then they went back into the warm and shut the door..."

"It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad."

"They always gives me bath salts," complained Nobby. "And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can't think why, 'cos it's not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You'd think they'd take the hint, wouldn't you?"

"Like sheep which, having been driven to a pasture, can now spread out at their leisure, the clouds began to drift. Afternoon sunlight sliced through into the still waters. The boomerang hung in the sky, and the boy thought he would have to find a new word for the way the colours gl."

"Life could be horrible in the wrong trouser of time."

"This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do."

"Charity ain't giving people what you wants to give, it's giving people what they need to get."

"In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?"

"It's a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying "Wow, a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening."

"Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone."

"The harder I work, the luckier I become."

"But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned."

"What was supposed to be so special about a full moon? It was only a big circle of light. And the dark of the moon was only darkness. But halfway between the two, when the moon was between the worlds of light and dark, when even the moon lived on the edge...maybe then a witch could believe in the moon."

"How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you."

"There is never a bad time for a pun. There's also never really a good time for a pun. You might as well just stay braced for a pun at all times, and ride them when they come with as much grace as you can manage.The fact that you can replace 'pun' with 'disaster' in the last three rules says a lot about the human race."

"God does not play games with His loyal servants", said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice."Whoopee", said Crowley."

"It's not lying when you do it to officers!"

"I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people."

"The beagle and the kobold approached, walking out of the dusty distance."

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men."

"He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spent ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air everyday."

"They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted."

"We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything."

"Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think."

"Is It Frightening To Be Free?"You said it."You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?"Seems to be a major human activity, yes."

"Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit."

"Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real."

"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people."

"Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days."

"Falling isn't so bad, you know. It's only the landing that hurts."

"War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said. "Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"Absol-well, okay." "Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?"All right, I'll grant you that, but-"Saving civilization from a horde of-" "It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply. "Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?"

"Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down."

"There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based."

"The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time."

"People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but expect dinner to turn up within the hour."

"NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOM OF NIT CAN STAY THESE MESENGERS ABOT THEIR DUTY."