If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship.

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

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...

Fortune favors the brave…

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.

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...

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...

…you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.

She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?”I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears...

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.

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...