Discworld

"People remember badly. But societies remember well, the swarm remembers, encoding the information to slip it past the censors of the mind, passing it on from grandmother to grandchild in little bits of nonsense they won't bother to forget. Sometimes the truth keeps itself alive in devious ways despite the best efforts of the official keepers of information. (p. 280)"

"She was shaking. But she was still alive, and that felt good. That's the thing about being alive. You're alive to enjoy it. (p. 254)"

"She seemed to have spent her whole life trying to make herself small, trying to be polite, apologizing when people walked over her, trying to be good-mannered. And what had happened? People had treated her as if she was small and polite and good-mannered. (p. 247)"

"As a rule, royalty doesn't read much. (p. 231)"

"And Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley. (p. 229)"

"Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is. (p. 220)"

"The bustle of the pre-nuptial activities rose up from the town. There'd be folkdancing, of course—there seemed to be no way of preventing it—and probably folksinging would be perpetrated. (p. 203)"

"If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail. (p. 199)"

"Royalty, when they marry, either get very small things, like exquisitely constructed clockwork eggs, or large bulky items, like duchesses. (p. 180)"

"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder."

"Beauty. Grace. That's what matters. If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember. (p. 158)"

""The thing about elves is they've got no...begins with m," Granny snapped her fingers irritably."

"It was a cottage of questioning witches, research witches. Eye of what newt? What species of ravined salt-sea shark? It's all very well a potion calling for Love-in-idleness, but which of the thirty-seven common plants called by that name in various parts of the continent was actually meant?"

"There was something about the eyes. It wasn't the shape or the color. The was no evil glint. But there was..."

"Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years', thirty years', ten years' time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia. (p. 111)"

"Nanny Ogg had a pragmatic attitude to the truth; she told it if it was convenient and she couldn't be bothered to make up something more interesting. (p. 97)"

""I never said nothing," said Nanny Ogg mildly."

""But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg."

"It was all very pretty, the cards were colored like little pasteboard jewels, and they had interesting names. But that little traitor voice whispered: how the hell can they know what the future holds? Cardboard isn't very bright. (p. 74)"

"People were always telling him to make something of his life, and that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a bed of it. (p. 49)"

"Stibbons gave up. Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red rag to a bu—was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it. (p. 48)"

"Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare. (p. 44)"

"Witches generally act as layers-out of the dead as well as midwives; there were plenty of people in Lancre for whom Nanny Ogg's face had been the first and last thing they'd ever seen, which had probably made the bit in the middle seem quite uneventful by comparison. (p. 41)"

"There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now you realize you're going to have to look a lot of people in the eye today and you're sober now and so are they but you can both remember. (p. 33)"

"He had formed the unusual opinion that the job of a king is to make the kingdom a better place for everyone to live in. (p. 21)"

"There's a certain glint in her eye generally possessed by those people who have found that they are more intelligent than most people around them but who haven't yet learned that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out. (p. 3)"

"Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before."

""Hah. I wasn't expecting you," he said."

"Even priests were coming to spend some time in it (i.e., the library), because of the collection of religious books. There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious book in the collection now, each one—according to itself—the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. As Didactylos used to say, you had to laugh. (p. 354)"

""I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts," said Brutha. "That way, everyone's happy." (p. 350)"

"You can think up a better way of ruling the country. Priests shouldn't do it. They can't think about it properly. Nor can soldiers. (p. 350)"

"And no one, as they hauled on timbers in the teeth of the gale, as Urn applied everything he knew about levers, as they used their helmets as shovels to dig under the wreckage, asked who it was they were digging for, or what kind of uniform they'd been wearing. (p. 348)"

"Borvorius produced a flask from somewhere."

"Gods? Huh!"

"But you have thousands," said the Newt God. "You fight for thousands."

"There the gods of the Discworld live."

"But You Are The Chosen One."

"You know, I used to think I was stupid, and then I met philosophers. (p. 340)"

"You've come to wage war on Omnia. This would not be a good idea."

"You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life. (p. 328)"

"We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies." He waved a hand towards the god. "Now we've got a truth to die for!"

"No. No smiting. No commandments unless you obey them too. (p. 325)"

"I think...you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time. (p. 325)"

"Don't put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles. (p. 323)"

"No tortoise had ever done this before. No tortoise in the whole universe. But no tortoise had ever been a god, and knew the unwritten motto of the Quisition: Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum."

"Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem. (p. 311)"

"Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection. (p. 307)"

"Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be. (p. 305)"

"But he's on our side. Aren't you, Brutha?"

"Brutha?" said Urn. "You're alive?"