«It wasn't blood in general he couldn't stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting.»

«The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty to reporting?.Thus, if a legend told of a notable hero that ?all men spoke of his prowess? any bard who valued his life would hastily add ?except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a loony, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.? Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like: ?His mighty steed was fast as the wind, on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,? any loose talk about a beloved having a face that could launch a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed own a very large seaport. Patrician Olaf II was eventually killed during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb ?The Pen is mightier than the Sword?.In his memory it was decided that the proverb would from now on include the phrase: ?only if the Sword is very small and the Pen very sharp.?»

«Something as artificial and human as an hour wouldn't last five minutes here. It would be dried out and shrivelled up in seconds.»

«The Quantum Weather Butterfly ( Papilio Tempestae ) is an undistinguished yellow color, its outstanding feature is its ability to create weather. This presumably began as a survival trait, since even an extremely hungry bird would find itself inconvenienced by a nasty localized tornado ( usually about 6 inches across ). From there it possibly became a secondary sexual characteristic, like the plumage of birds. Look at *me*, the male says, flapping his wings lazily in the canopy of the rain forest. I may be an undistinguished yellow color but in a fortnight's time, a thousand miles away, Freak Gales Cause Road Chaos. This is the butterfly of the storm»

«I'm going out of my mind, ( mind speaks ) Good idea, its getting pretty crowded in here...»

«He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe- which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.»

«Now the melting pot was full of lumps again.»

«The [printing] press waited, ... It looked, now, like a great big beast. Soon, he'd throw a lot of words into it. And in a few hours it would be hungry again, as if those words had never happened. You could feed it, but you could never fill it up.»

«You know me, Esme. I couldn't subtract a fart from a plate of beans.»

«It's either because of the number of times the scholar puts the boot into Peter Jackson [the director of The Lord of the Rings films] or is making a point they have never heard of.»