"He'd never told people they ought to be happy, and imposed a kind of happiness on them. The invisible people knew that happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in. (p. 293)"

"Greebo wasn't a happy cat. People had made a fuss just because he'd dragged a roast turkey off the table. (p. 294)"

"Greebo's technique was unscientific and wouldn't have stood a chance against any decent swordsmanship, but on his side was the fact that it is almost impossible to develop decent swordsmanship when you seem to have run into a food mixer that is biting your ear off. (p. 312)"

"Magic's far too important to be used for rulin' people. (p. 316)"

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

"The nobles of Genua had enough experience to know what it means when a ruler says something is not compulsory. (p. 325)."

"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)"

"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)"

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

"Apart from being as well-adapted a parasite as the oak bracket fungus, Lady Volentia D'Arrangement was, by and large, a blameless sort of person. (p. 272)"

""Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face." (pp. 348-349)"

"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..."

"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)"

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

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

"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)"

"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."

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

"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?""

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

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

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

"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)"

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

"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)."

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

"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)"

"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?"

"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)"

"Mothers like her exist everywhere, and apparently nothing can be done about them. (p. 313)"

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

"What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up? (p. 305)"

"No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids. (p. 301)"

"He lay back and smiled. It was never too late to have a good life. (p. 311)"

"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)"

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

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

"It was no longer the full-nosed roaring of a forty-winks catnapper, but the well-paced growling of someone who wanted to make a night of it."

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

"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."

"He couldn't help remembering how much he'd wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they'd been starving—anything with meat on it would have done. (p. 106)"

"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."

"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."