Quote collection
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"Several sellers of hot meat pies and sausages in a bun had appeared from nowhere and were doing a brisk trade. [Footnote: They always do, everywhere. No-one sees them arrive. The logical explaination is that the franchise includes the stall, the paper hat and a small gas-powered time machine.]"
"Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again."
"Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists."
"YOU FEAR TO DIE? "It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break."
"Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on who he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people."
"People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant."
"Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust? Very nearly everyone, come to think of it."
"Oh, where are my manners? Do sit down. Pull up a small child."
"Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes."
"But in his experience it was only a matter of time before the normal balance of the universe restored itself and started doing the usual terrible things to him."
"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."
"Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses."
"Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything."
"For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own."
"They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time."
"Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them-when she thought about them at all-as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right."
"Smaller-than-Medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock"
"Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!"
"As far as Death was aware, the sole reason for any human association with pigs and lambs was as a prelude to chops and sausages. Quite why they should dress up for children’s wallpaper as well was a mystery. Hello, little folk, this is what you’re going to eat… He felt that if only he could find the key to it, he’d know a lot more about human beings."
"- DON’T WORRY, IT WON’T BE FOREVER. - Good. - IT MAY SEEM LIKE FOREVER."