The Librarian was not familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bit ethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knew where you were with kindness, especially if...

Good evening, gentlemen!’ said the vampire. ‘Please pay attention. I am a reformed vampire, which is to say, I am a bundle of repressed instincts held together with spit and coffee. It would be wrong...

Veil, you see, if I vas to say something portentous like “zer dark eyes of zer mind” back home in Uberwald, zer would be a sudden crash of thunder,’ said Otto. ‘And if I vas...

Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they’re lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.

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.

Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo.

I thought you were all law-abiding? Oh, yes, sir. Very law-abiding. Just not very merciful.

Vimes stuck his helmet under his arm, smoothed back his hair, and knocked. He’d considered asking Sargent Colon to accompany him, but had brushed the idea aside quickly. He couldn’t have tolerated the sniggering. Anyway,...

Triboplasts played a crucial role in evolution, precisely because they did have internal organs, and in particular they could ingest food and excrete it. Their excreta became a major resource for other creatures; to get...

The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I’m not sure about the turnip.

Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like...

I’m not a lady, I’m a witch.

Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that...

‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany. ‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man. ‘No, ‘ said Tiffany patiently. ‘It’s about zoology. ‘Zoology eh? That’s a...

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.

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

He took his hands off the oars and pulled in the mooring rope. If I make a couple of loops, he thought, I can strap the axe on to my back.He had a mental picture...

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for...

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet … and yet …Inside this little world they...

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.

I just think the world ought to be more sort of organized.”That’s just fantasy,’ said Twoflower.’I know. That’s the trouble.’ Rincewind sighed again.

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

I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,” said Granny firmly. “Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons,...

But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?” […]”That works, but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.

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

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean...

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...

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

[…]And his head is on fire with new things[…]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that...

Oh, yes.” There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take...

the whole point of the wish business was to see to it that what the client got was exactly what he asked for and exactly what he didn’t really want.

History needs shepherds, not butchers.

Someone broke from the scrum and, punching and kicking, staggered towards the Klatchian goal.”Isn’t that man your butler?” said Ahmed.”Yes.””One of your soldiers said he bit a man’s nose off.”Vimes shrugged. “He’s got a very...

The other two entered the room. Vimes gave his men his usual look of resigned dismay.”My squad,” he mumbled.”Fine body of men,” said Lady Ramkin. “The good old rank and file, eh?””The rank, anyway,” said...

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

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...

No, what he didn’t like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

There was a party of well-dressed people with Gilt, and as they progressed accoss the room the whole place began to revolve around the big man, gold being very dense and having a gravity all...

And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one...

DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.

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

The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there...

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...

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

Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea...

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

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and...

… a man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue…