Discworld

"Greebo also had a cat's approach to possessions, which was simply that nothing edible had a right to belong to other people. (p. 77)"

"He sighed, and leaned over the desk. "You see," he said, "cheese does make money. And opera doesn't. Opera's what you spend money on."

""The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case, and that's only the start of it." (pp. 73-74)"

"A catastrophe curve, Mr. Bucket, is what opera runs along. Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong, Mr. Bucket. It works because of hatred and love and nerves. All the time. This isn't cheese. This is opera. If you wanted a quiet retirement, Mr. Bucket, you shouldn't have bought the Opera House. You should have done something peaceful, like alligator dentistry. (pp. 68-69)"

"Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!"

"There have been...accidents."

"Mr. Bucket was sitting in his office trying to make sense of the Opera House's books."

"Salzella smiled at her. "You mean you just see things that are really there?" he said. "I can see you haven't been with the opera for long, dear." (p. 56)"

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, "Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all." (p. 54)"

""Weeelll, they starts out as Maids of Honor," said Nanny, fidgeting with her feet, "but they ends up Tarts." (p. 54)"

"A couple of ballet dancers fainted, but carefully, so as not to get their clothes dirty. (p. 53)"

"A day ago the future had looked aching and desolate, and now it looked full of surprises and terror and bad things happening to people..."

""You've never been very good at numbers, have you? said Granny. Now she drew a circle around the final figure."

"Granny Weatherwax was grudgingly literate but keenly numerate. She assumed that anything written down was probably a lie, and that applied to numbers, too. Numbers were used only by people who wanted to put one over on you. (p. 40)"

"Hah! Why dint you put your own name on it, eh? Books've got to have a name on 'em so's everyone knows who's guilty. (p. 39)"

"No one had asked her, before she was born, whether she wanted a lovely personality or whether she'd prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take size nine in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys. (p. 31)"

""...and my father is the Emperor of Klatch and my mother is a small tray of raspberry puddings." (Agnes tells Christine after realizing she isn't listening) (p. 30)"

"Music and magic had a lot in common. They were only two letters apart, for one thing. And you couldn't do both. (p. 28)"

"Nanny also recalled her as being rather thoughtful and shy, as if trying to reduce the amount of world she took up. (p. 27)"

"The girl who had spoken to her was slightly built, even by ordinary standards, and had gone to some pains to make herself look even thinner. She had long blond hair and the happy smile of someone who is aware that she is thin and has long blond hair. (p. 24)"

""Do give us your forthright views," said Salzella. Definitely that kind of owner, he thought. Self-made man proud of his handiwork. Confuses bluffness and honesty with merely being rude. I wouldn't mind betting a dollar that he thinks he can tell a man's character by testing the firmness of his handshake and looking deeply into his eyes. (p. 22)"

"Granny was impressed. It was an outrageously ingenious bit of folk hokum worth remembering for another occasion. (pp. 18-19)"

"You needed at least three witches for a coven. Two witches was just an argument. (p. 13)"

"She'd even given herself a middle initial—X—which stood for "someone who has a cool and exciting middle initial." (p. 11)"

"He had a unique stride: it looked as though his body was being dragged forward and his legs had to flail around underneath it, landing wherever they could find room. It wasn't so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely postponed. (p. 10)"

"People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people. (pp. 5-6)"

"Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed to even think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat (p. 4)"

"She'd become so good at magic that there wasn't room in her head for anything else. (p. 2)"

"They'd drag him off and it'd be the start of another Adventure, i. e., a period of horror and unpleasantness. Life was full of tricks like that. (p. 368)"

"The rain was coming down so fast that the drops were having to queue. (p. 343)"

"Besides, he'd never believed in legends up to now—not even the one about the peasant who every year filed a scrupulously accurate tax return. (p. 340)"

"He thought: meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever, to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try and get your mind around the Universe before you can give it a twist. (p. 323)"

"Not some kind of sign?" said Cohen. "There must have been some temple I didn't rob."

"Of course, it was only a temporary measure, but Rincewind had always considered that life was no more than a series of temporary measures strung together. (p. 307)"

"What do we do now?" said Mr. Saveloy. "Do we do a battle chant or something?"

"It was an amazingly symbolic, dramatic and above all stupid gesture, in the finest traditions of barbarian heroing. (p. 294)"

"He grinned to himself. The whole of his life, so far, had been complicated. There had been timetables and lists and a whole basket of things he must do and things he shouldn't do, and the life of Mr. Saveloy had been this little wriggly thing trying to survive in the middle of it all. But now it has suddenly all become very simple. You held one end and poked the other into people. A man could live his whole life by a maxim like that. And afterwards, get a very interesting afterlife—(pp. 286-287)"

"Oh...and Bacon Surprise."

"Although it was against his general principles, it was perhaps time to stop and think. (p. 239)"

"Lord Hong had a mind like a knife, although possibly a knife with a curved blade. (p. 235)"

"There was another passage. He ran down it, on the basis that absence of pursuit is no reason to stop running. (p. 235)"

"From; that was the most important factor in any mindless escape. You were always running from. To could look after itself. (p. 227)"

"Well, anyway gentlemen...you might not yet be civilized but at least you're nice and clean, and many people think this is identical. (p. 221)"

"The Empire's got something worse than whips, all right. It's got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different. (p. 215)"

"The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open. (pp. 214-215)"

"Never a good idea to give a monkey the key to the banana plantation. (pp. 212-213)"

""But there are causes worth dying for," said Butterfly."

"Nevertheless, no useful purpose will be served by killing this hardworking tax gatherer."

"Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, "What happens if I do this?" (p. 186)"

"The Emperor wasn't simply at Death's door but well inside the hallway, admiring the carpet and commenting on the hatstand. (p. 184)"