"Battle elephants! Teppic groaned. Tsort went in for battle elephants, too. Battle elephants were the fashion lately. They weren't much good for anything except trampling on their own when they inevitably panicked, so the military minds on both sides had responded by breeding bigger elephants. Elephants were impressive. (p. 256)"

"Dios sat on the steps of the throne and stared gloomily at the floor. The gods didn't listen. He knew that. He knew that, of all people. But it had never mattered before. It was the ritual that was important, not the gods. The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to? (p. 271)"

"The noise stopped, filling the air with the dark metallic clang of sudden silence. (p. 301)"

"She had a number of stoutly-held views on a variety of subjects, but most of them involved the flaying alive of people she disapproved of. This meant most people under the age of thirty-five, to start with. (p. 310)"

"Just because fate throws you together doesn't mean fate's got it right. (p. 312)"

"A few stars had been let out early. Teppic looked up at them. Perhaps, he thought, there is life somewhere else. On the stars, maybe. If it's true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere."

"From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them."

"However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next."

"Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken. (p. 4)"

"Those first pyramids had been built by human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium, who had cut rocks into pieces and then painfully put them back together again in a better shape. (p. 96)"

"You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated. (p. 100)"

"Funny, that. When he was alive it had all seemed so sensible, so obvious. Now he was dead it looked a huge waste of effort. (p. 71)"

"Whatever his eyes were focused on wasn't occupying the usual set of dimensions. (p. 65)"

"Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do. (p. 77)"

"Therefore I will have dinner sent in," said the priest. "It will be roast chicken."

"When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions. (p. 58)"

"The king looked surprised."

""Are you all right, O jeweled master of the sun?" one of them ventured."

"Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language. No, we do it for the money. And because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money. There can be few cleaner motives, shorn of all pretense.(p. 46)"

"It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free. (p. 35)"

"The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterward. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible. (p. 56)"

"That was extremely symbolic as well, although no one could remember what of. (p. 62)"

"Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid. (p. 135)"

"There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification. (p. 6)"

"All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed. (p. 5)"

"The important thing is not how many people you inhume, it's how many fail to inhume you. (pp. 20-21)"

"'Kiddo? I'll have you know the blood of Pharaohs runs in my veins!'"

"No one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum. (p. 3)"

"It's a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the job spec."

"His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centred as a gyroscope. (p. 29)"

""Well, yes," said the IIa, very embarrassed, because interfering with the divine flow of money was alien to his personal religion. (p. 154)"

"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."

""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)"

"Death put down his drink and stepped forward."

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

"Granny stepped forward, her eyes two sapphires of bitterness. "I'm goin' to give you the hidin' our Mam never gave you, Lily Weatherwax. Not with magic, not with headology, not with a stick like our Dad had, aye, and he used a fair bit as I recall—but with skin. And not because you was the bad one. Not because you meddled with stories. Everyone has a path they got to tread. But because, and I wants you to understand this prop'ly, after you went I had to be the good one. You had all the fun. An' there's no way I can make you pay for that, Lily, but I'm surely goin' to give it a try...""

""We're her godmothers," said Granny."

"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."

""I could make some new gods and get everyone to believe in 'em real good. How about that?" said Mrs. Gogol. Nanny shook her head."

"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)"

"She hated everything that predestined people, that fooled them, that made them slightly less than human. (p. 291)"

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

"Nanny Ogg looked him up and down or, at least, down and further down."

"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)"

"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays. (p. 282)"

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. (p. 305)"

"Anyway, it'll be int'resting to see if it works."

"The footman, recognizing instantly the boundless bad manners of the well-bred, backed away quickly. (p. 262)"