Discworld

"Once you were in the hands of a Grand Vizier, you were dead. Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: "Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister." (p. 178)"

"They never worried about what other people thought. Mr. Saveloy, who'd spent his whole life worrying about what other people thought and had been passed over for promotion and generally treated as a piece of furniture as a result, found this strangely attractive. And they never agonized about anything, or wondered if they were doing the right thing. And they enjoyed themselves immensely. They had a kind of honor. He liked the Horde. They weren't his kind of people. (p. 149)"

"Rincewind listened. There was, he thought, probably something in the idea that there were only a few people in the world. There were lots of bodies, but only a few people. That's why you kept running into the same ones. There was probably some mold somewhere. (p. 136)"

"He might, if he had time, have reflected that the purpose of civilization is to make violence the final resort, while to a barbarian it is the first, preferred, only and above all most enjoyable option. (p. 133)"

"When many expect a mighty stallion they will find hooves on an ant. (p. 118)"

""Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." (p. 100)"

"There are torturers in Hunghung who can keep a man alive for years."

"The guards were pretty much like guards as Rincewind had experienced them everywhere. They had exactly the amount of intellect required to hit people and drag them off to the scorpion pit. (p. 97)"

"A foot on the neck is nine points of the law. (p. 97)"

""You know, you sound a very educated man for a barbarian," said Rincewind."

"He believed in coincidence a lot more than he did in magic. (p. 71)"

"I heard the Empire has a tyrannical and repressive government!"

"But...if you put aside for the moment the certainty that something would definitely go horribly wrong, it looked foolproof. The trouble was that wizards were such ingenious fools. (p. 52)"

"Ridcully assumed that anything people had time to write down couldn't be important. (p. 48)"

"The root problem, Rincewind had come to believe, was that he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future, something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where the good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. If was as if he always got the indigestion before the meal and felt so dreadful that he never actually managed to eat anything. (p. 45)"

"Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it was something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep, and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you. (p. 45)"

"The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity some time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was often quite coherent, although not by normal human standards. (p. 19)"

"Oh, no," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. "Not that. That's meddling with things you don't understand."

"The Empire?" squeaked the Dean. "Me? But they hate foreigners!"

""Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes," said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.‡"

"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 to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason. (p. 14)"

"Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, one of them had to be teaching. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students. (p. 14)"

"According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized. (p. 4)"

"Fate always wins..."

""Them? I didn't know they were noble," said Io."

"He had little involvement with individual humans. He generally looked after lightning and thunder, so from his point of view the only purpose of humanity was to get wet or, in occasional cases, charred. (p. 3)"

"There was always an argument about whether the newcomer was a goddess at all. Certainly no one ever got anywhere by worshipping her, and she tended to turn up only where she was least expected, such as now. And people who trusted in her seldom survived. Any temples built to her would surely be struck by lightning. Better to juggle axes on a tightrope than say her name. Just call her the waitress in the Last Chance saloon."

"Fate wins. At least, so it is claimed. Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been Fate.‡"

"Gods can take any form, but the one aspect of themselves they cannot change is their eyes, which show their nature. The eyes of Fate are hardly eyes at all—just dark holes into an infinity speckled with what may be stars or, there again, may be other things. (p. 1)"

"This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world."

"There is a curse."

"Somewhere, in some other world far away from the Discworld, someone tentatively picked up a musical instrument that echoed to the rhythm in their soul."

"Far above the world, Death nodded. You could choose immortality, or you could choose humanity. (p. 369)"

"There was no word for it. Even eternity was a human idea. Giving it a name gave it a length; admittedly, a very long one. But this darkness was what was left when eternity had given up. It was where Death lived. Alone. (p. 367)"

"But my parents still died."

"There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise. (p. 359)"

"And the universe came into being."

"Satchelmouth had been made aware that he had a soul and, though it had a few holes in it and was a little ragged around the edges, he cherished the hope that some day the god Reg would find him a place in a celestial combo. You didn't get the best gigs if you were a murderer. You probably had to play the viola. (p. 354)"

"The thought was flooding into his mind, and not for the first time, that Mr. Clete was not playing with a full orchestra, that he was one of those people who built their own hot madness out of sane and chilly parts. (p. 354)"

"There's no pockets in a shroud, Glod."

"Death was used to travelling fast. In theory he was already everywhere, waiting for almost anything else. The fastest way to travel is to be there already. (p. 351)"

"Of course, just because we've heard a spine-chilling bloodcurdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong. (p. 339)"

"The Archchancellor polished his staff as he walked along. It was a particularly good one, six feet long and quite magical. Not that he used magic very much. In his experience, anything that couldn't be disposed of with a couple of whacks from six feet of oak was probably immune to magic as well. (p. 313)"

"How long were you asleep?"

"He was making money. Thousands of dollars in a day! And a hundred music traps were lined up in front of the stage, ready to capture Buddy's voice. If it went on at this rate, in several billion years he'd be rich beyond his wildest dreams! (p. 310)"

"What was strange to Susan was that she felt nothing. She could think sad thoughts, because in the circumstances they had to be sad. She knew who was in the coach. But it had already happened. There was nothing she could do to stop it, because if she'd stopped it, it wouldn't have happened. And she was here watching it happen. So she hadn't. So it had. She felt the logic of the situation dropping into place like a series of huge leaden slabs. (p. 301)"

"Now he wondered if she existed. If it came to that, he was only half-certain that he existed, except for the times when he was onstage. (p. 294)"

"Presumably Death had a bedroom, although proverbially Death never slept. Perhaps he just lay in bed reading. (p. 285)"

"Then he remembered that the blasted Dibbler man was involved. Expecting Dibbler not to think about anything concerning money was like expecting rocks not to think about gravity. (p. 285)"

""We need to get it together if we're going to wow them at the Festival," said Crash."