""Huh! Priests!" said Mr. Shoe. "They're all the same. Always telling you that you're going to live again after you're dead, but you just try it and see the look on their faces!" (p. 131)"

"Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason. (p. 159)"

"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)"

""It can't be intelligent, can it?" said the Bursar."

"William Spigot was the one that sang when he worked, breaking into that long nasal whine which meant that folk song was about to be perpetrated. (p. 203)"

"That was the bloody trouble, every time. Whenever someone was trying to do a bit of sensible thinking, there was always some pointless distraction. (p. 212)"

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

"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)"

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

"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."

"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)"

"Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen."

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."

"What he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk."

"The Watch were always careful not to intervene too soon in any brawl where the odds were not heavily stacked in their favour. The job carried a pension, and attracted a cautious, thoughtful kind of man."

"It could be worse," he said by way of farewell. "It could be me."

"That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next."

"At the back of his mind a bad feeling began to grow. He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep, moreover, that could afford to employ wolves."

"Picturesque meant - he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word - that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown. Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant 'idiot'."

"It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows."

"'You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree.'"

"What heroes like best is themselves."

"'We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index,' he said. 'Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects.'"

"The only reason for walking into the jaws of Death is so's you can steal his gold teeth."

"'It is forbidden to fight on the Killing Ground,' he said, and paused while he considered the sense of this. 'You know what I mean, anyway...'"

"Ripples of paradox spread out across the sea of causality."

"He wondered what kind of life it would be, having to keep swimming all the time to stay exactly in the same place. Pretty similar to his own, he decided."

"Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying."

"It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself."

"I've seen excitement, and I've seen boredom. And boredom was best."

"'What's this wine—crushed octopus eyeballs?'"

"'We don't have gods where I come from,' said Twoflower."

"'[...] on the disc, the Gods are not so much worshipped as blamed.'"

"Don't ask me how I knew—I suppose it was because it was just about the worst possible thing that was likely to happen."

"A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls."

"The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort."

"The pen is mightier than the sword ... if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp."

"The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world."

"I suppose you wouldn't happen to know the way out of the forest, possibly, by any chance?"

"There had been an unseen observer of all this. It was of course entirely against the rules, but Trymon knew all about rules and had always considered they were for making, not obeying."

"He wanted to say all this, and couldn't. For a man with an itch to see the whole of infinity, Twoflower never actually moved outside his own head. Telling him the truth would be like kicking a spaniel."

"Weems might have had a room-temperature IQ, but he knew idiocy when he saw it."

"Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead."

"'Dead?' said Rincewind, In the debating chamber of his mind a dozen emotions got to their feet and started shouting. Relief was in full spate when Shock cut in on a point of order and then Bewilderment, Terror and Loss started a fight which was ended only when Shame slunk in from next door to see what all the row was about."

"Darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply its absence."

"Ankh-Morpork!"