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“Say nothing then. You do not need to speak of it to make it so. It has occurred.”
“But I shall think it a dream.”
“All life is thus.”

Dr. Peddie had once explained to Goodsir that the vast majority of the medicines were useless for the specific sailor’s ailments — most merely served to clean out the bowels and belly in an explosive manner — but the more powerful the purgative, the more effective the seamen thought the treatment was. It was the idea of medicinal help that helped the sailors heal, according to the late Peddie.

Babies are born knowing how to cry, but not how to laugh. In the world, however, they quickly get the knack of laughter. This is so now, and was so then, in the time of the earth’s flatness. And perhaps each of these facts—the instinctive equipment with grief, the swift acceptance of pleasure—says at once very much concerning the school of life.

They invoked also their own Wit, by the name of Muses; their own Ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own Lust, by the name of Cupid; their own Rage, by the name of Furies; their own privy members by the name of Priapus; and attributed their pollutions, to Incubi and Succubae:
— Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

[M]ost of his money and allocated hold space had been dedicated to three hundred and twenty-four bottles of whiskey. It was not fine Scotch whiskey, but it would suffice. Crozier knew that he had long since reached that point of being the kind of drunkard where quantity always trumped quality.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
— Christina Baldwin

You might think that a name like Stank would put people off. But in fact the mountain village of Stank had once been a very popular place for tourists. They liked to send messages home saying, ‘We’re stinking in Stank.’ And go home with presents for their loved ones like tunics with ‘I’ve been to Stank and all I’ve brought home is this stinking tunic’ written on them.

‘How many husbands have you actually had, Nanny?’ asked Tiffany.
Nanny appeared to be counting. ‘Three of my own, and let’s just say I’ve run out of fingers on the rest, as it were.’

[…T]he standardization and spread of the alphabet by the Phoenicians, and what made it so revolutionary, is that alphabetic writing is not as complicated as the non-alphabetic writing systems of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. This, in turn, meant that literacy rates could potentially rise, since anyone, from the lowest levels of society to the highest, could now learn how to read and write with greater ease.

But the reward for lots of work seemed to be lots more. If you dug the biggest hole, they just gave you a bigger shovel.

“I thought you said both Strong and Evans were back.” […]
“They are, Captain. Or at least half of them. When we went to look at the body propped there at the stern, it fell over and …well … came apart. As best we can tell, it’s Billy Strong from the waist up. Tommy Evans from the waist down.”

People lived, and died, and were remembered. It happened in the same way that winter followed summer. It was not a wrong thing. There were tears, of course, but they were for those who were left; those who had gone on did not need them.

Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter is mass, and mass changes time and space.

Before the beginning of the history men remember, there are black eons of which it is perhaps better not to know.
—Von Junzt, Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten

[C]riteria to define a dark age […] (1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a breakdown of the centralized economy; (4) a settlement shift; […] (5) population decline […] (6) a loss of writing; and (7) a pause in the construction of monumental architecture.

The past needs to be remembered. If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going.

Ankh-Morpork! It’s a wonderful town! The trolls are up and the dwarfs are down! Slightly better than living in a hole in the ground! Ankh-Morpork! It’s a wonderfuuuuuulllll townnn!

The forget-me-lots is a pretty red and white flower usually given by young ladies to signal to their young men that they never wanted to see them again ever, or at least until they’d learned to wash properly and got a job.

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

Romancin’ is verrae important, ye ken. Basically it’s a way the boy can get close to the girl wi’oot her attackin’ him and scratchin’ his eyes oot.’

All this hasn’t happened yet. It might not happen at all. The future is always a bit wobbly. Any little thing, like the fall of a snowflake or the dropping of the wrong kind of spoon, can send it spinning off along a new path. Or perhaps not.

We live in the three moments of expectation, attention, and memory, and none of them can exist without the others.

We heard a song, it went ‘Twinkle twinkle little star . . .’ What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!

They say that when some vampires bit her they all started to crave tea and sweet biscuits.

A man shall not boast of the fish that fled
Or the bear he failed to flay;
Bigger they be than those borne back
To hang their heads in the hall.

There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.

Magic […] is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.