"Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green. (p. 201)"

"Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government. (p. 176)"

"Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterwards. (pp. 203-204)"

""I don't want to hurt you, Mistress Weatherwax," said Mrs. Gogol."

""Haven't you got any romance in your soul?" said Magrat plaintively."

"This is Greebo. Between you and me, he's a fiend from hell."

"Listen, happy endings is fine if they turn out happy," said Granny, glaring at the sky. "But you can't make 'em for other people. Like the only way you could make a happy marriage is by cuttin' their heads off as soon as they say ‘I do', yes? You can't make happiness..."

"'Tell me,' said Magrat, 'you said your mummy knows about the big bad wolf in the woods, didn't you?'"

"The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people. (p. 125)"

"The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match. (p. 147)"

"People are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model airplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time—there's that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from fast asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking. (p. 93)"

"Nanny's mouth spread in an evil grin."

"I wondered about that," said Nanny. "Then I thought maybe I was imagining things."

"All witches are very conscious of stories. They can feel stories, in the same way that a bather in a little pool can feel the unexpected trout."

"Greebo turned upon Granny Weatherwax a yellow-eyed stare of self-satisfied malevolence, such as cats always reserve for people who don't like them, and purred. Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr. (p. 48)"

"She heard Nanny say: "Beats me why they're always putting invisible runes on their doors. I mean, you pays some wizard to put invisible runes on your door, and how do you know you've got value for money?""

"Look," said Magrat desperately, "why don't I go by myself?"

"In the dim light she could see Granny's face which seemed to be suggesting that if Magrat was at her wit's end, it was a short stroll. (p. 64)"

"Granny Weatherwax didn't like maps. She felt instinctively that they sold the landscape short. (p. 27)"

"Magrat plunged on with the brave desperation of someone dancing in the light of their burning bridges. (p. 161)"

"It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is. (p. 32)"

""I hate mirrors," muttered the Duc."

"But then...it used to be so simple, once upon a time."

"Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy seraph of Al-Ybi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered. (p. 6)"

"In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Morris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring. They don't dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?"

"It's a big responsibility, fairy godmothering. Knowing when to stop, I mean. People whose wishes get granted often don't turn out to be very nice people. So should you give them what—or what they need? (p. 10)."

"There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another—language was just there to hide their thoughts. (p. 319)"

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (p. 321)"

"Death said nothing. He helped her up onto the horse."

"If you wanted to get anywhere in this world—and she'd decided, right at the start, that she wanted to get as far as it was possible to go—you wore names lightly, and you took power anywhere you found it. She had buried three husbands, and at least two of them had already been dead. (p. 14)"

"In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. (pp. 316-317)"

"You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you're told. (p. 20)"

"Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble. (p. 162)"

"With any luck, they'd have best of both worlds. Not just feeling...but knowing."

"The villagers had said justice had been done, and she’d lost patience and told them to go home, then, and pray to whoever gods they believed in that it was never done to them. Because the smug face of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as wickedness revealed."

"But she’d never set out to be nice. When you went up against some of the opponents she’d met, nice people would finish last, or not even finish."

"She’d taken them to his farm and showed them where to dig, and he’d thrown himself down and asked her for mercy, because he said he’d been drunk and it’d all been done in alcohol. Her words came back to her. She’d said, in sobriety: end it in hemp."

"Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to be good."

"It was, as he was wonderfully well placed to know, merely putting off the inevitable. But wasn't that what living was all about? (p. 277)"

"His voice shook with rage."

"“Er…you don’t think she’s losing it, do you?” “No one’ll be able to find it if she has,” said Nanny."

"Unlike the magic of wizards, the magic of witches did not usually involve the application of much raw power. The difference is that between hammers and levers. Witches generally tried to find the small point where a little change made a lot of result. To make an avalanche you can either shake the mountain, or maybe you can just find exactly the right place to drop a snowflake."

"Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. (p. 262)"

"Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn't mean stupid. It just means that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges. (p. 297)"

"So she’d been good. She was good at justice. She was good at medicine, particularly that type of medicine which started in the head. She was good at winning. She was good, though she said it herself, at most of the things she set her mind at. But not nice. She had to admit it. And it seemed that people preferred nice to good."

""But how can a city be alive? It's only made up of dead parts!" said Ludmilla."

"“I did start out in witchcraft to get boys, to tell you the truth.” “Think I don’t know that?” “What did you start out to get, Esme?” Granny stopped, and looked up at the frosty sky and then down at the ground. “Dunno,” she said at last. “Even, I suppose.”"

"The Dean himself didn't know when he'd been happier. For sixty years he'd been obeying all the self-regulating rules of wizardry, and suddenly he was having the time of his life. He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat. (p. 242)"

"He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn't happen to you every year. (p. 182)"

"The senior wizards know that the proper purpose of magic is to form a social pyramid with the wizards on top of it, eating big dinners. (p. 189)"