Discworld

"He hated the very idea of the world being divided into the shaved and the shavers. Or those who wore the shiny boots and those who cleaned the mud off them. Every time he saw Willikins the butler fold his, Vimes's, clothes, he suppressed a terrible urge to kick the butler's shiny backside as an affront to the dignity of man. (p. 6)"

"People healed, books didn't. (p. 5)"

"Oh? Are you offering to teach me something?"

"But you can't go round messin' with cause and effect. That's what sent her mad, come the finish. She thought she could put herself outside of things like cause and effect. Well, you can't. You grab a sharp sword by the blade, you get hurt. World'd be a terrible place if people forgot that. (p. 352)"

"There's a kind of magic in masks. Masks conceal one face, but they reveal another. The one that only comes out in darkness. (p. 332)"

"Oh, yes! A ghost of a Ghost! Totally unbelievable and an offense against common sense, in the best operatic tradition! (p. 330)"

"Granny slapped her hands together like the crack of doom."

"It's tangled, but it ain't twisted. (p. 326)"

"Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts too black even for a witch. She practiced headology—practiced, in fact, until she was very good at it. And though there may be some superficial similarities between a psychiatrist and a headologist, there is a huge practical difference. A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavor to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick. (p. 324)"

""I...hang around in dark places looking for trouble," he said."

""Seein' is believin'," said Granny, calmly. "Of course, the trouble is that believin' is also seein', and there's been too much of that round here lately." (p. 304)"

"She was as unnoticeable as the very best of butlers. (p. 304)"

"Erratic though his thinking might have been, it was no match for Nanny Ogg's meretricious duplicity. He was up against a mind that regarded truth as a reference point but certainly not as a shackle. Nanny Ogg could think her way through a corkscrew in a tornado without touching the sides. (pp. 298-299)"

""Oh, well," said Granny, "you'll never get anywhere if you believe what you hear. What do you know?" (p. 294)"

""Ah," said Granny. "Believed the evidence of your own eyes, did you? In a place like this?" (p. 294)"

""Well, I think," said Nobby, "that when you have ruled out the impossible, what is left, however improbable, ain't worth hanging around on a cold night wonderin' about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink." (pp. 288-289)"

"The kicking and punching stopped only when it became apparent that all the mob was attacking was itself. And, since the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters, it was never very clear to anyone what had happened. (p. 287)"

""This is just an old staircase, isn't it?" said Nanny, prodding at the darkness with her torch."

"Agnes gave up. It was a horrible thing to learn, but there are times when evidence gets trampled and the hunt is on. (p. 278)"

"Granny glared at her escort. Even in a bow tie, even with his fine mustaches waxed, he was still a cat. You couldn't trust them to do anything except turn up for meals. (p. 264)"

"His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people. (p. 251)"

"Nanny could get a statue to cry on her shoulder and say what it really thought about pigeons. (p. 242)"

"She'd have to shout for help."

"He was finding it a little difficult to converse with her. As a conversational gambit, "Hello, I understand you have a lot of money, can I have some please?" lacked, he felt, a certain subtlety. (p. 218)"

"The pre-luncheon drinks were going quite well, Mr Bucket thought. Everyone was making polite conversation and absolutely no one had been killed up to the present moment. (p. 217)"

"Mr. Bucket's mental compass once again swung around to point due Money. (p. 211)"

"It's still a lie. Like the lie about masks."

"No male had ever touched Agnes before, except perhaps to push her over and steal her sweets. (p. 203)"

"Money don't buy happiness, Gytha."

"She was also enough of a snob to confuse rudeness with good breeding. In the same way that the really rich can never be mad (they're eccentric), so they can also never be rude (they're outspoken and forthright). (p. 197)"

"Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you'd grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong. (p. 165)"

"Nanny rather liked the theatrical world. It was its own kind of magic. That was why Esme disliked it, she reckoned. It was the magic of illusions and misdirection and foolery, and that was fine by Nanny Ogg, because you couldn't be married three times without a little fooling. But it was just close enough to Granny's own kind of magic to make Granny uneasy. (p. 161)"

"Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down. (p. 156)"

"This was when you started being a witch. It wasn't when you did headology on daft old men, or mixed up medicines, or stuck up for yourself, or knew one herb from another."

"A lot of attention had been paid to appearances. The people were here to look, not to see. (p. 146)"

""Well, basically there are two sorts of opera," said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. "There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like ‘Oh, oh, oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'," and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes ‘Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!', although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely." (p. 140)"

"Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages; she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a new one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentically foreign gibberish. (p. 139)"

"Honestly, Salzella...what is the difference between opera and madness?"

"They simply worked around the problem, and engraved everything. This took a long time and meant that Ankh-Morpork was, for example, denied the benefit of newspapers, leaving the population to fool themselves as best they could. (p. 132)"

"After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way. (p. 125)"

"This isn't real life, this is opera. (p. 123)"

"It's a house of ill repute, is what it is!"

"The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille. (p. 119)"

"It was done far more often than the audiences ever realized—when singers had a sore throat, or had completely dried, or had turned up so drunk they could barely stand, or, in one notorious instance many years previously, had died in the interval and subsequently sung their famous aria by means of a broom handle stuck up their back and their jaw operated with a piece of string. (p. 116)"

""But why is he doing it?" wailed Bucket."

""But I don't believe in reincarnation!" he protested."

"She felt the same feeling she'd felt back home. Sometimes life reaches that desperate point where the wrong thing to do has to be the right thing to do."

"They said love always found a way and, of course, so did a number of associated activities. (p. 95)"

"Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows.‡"

"But magic is never as simple as people think. It has to obey certain universal laws. And one is that, no matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it'll become a whole lot easier and will therefore be done a lot. (p. 86)"