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Inspirations sleet through the universe continuously. Their destination, as if they cared, is the right mind in the place at the right time. They hit the right neuron, there’s a chain reaction, and a little while later someone is blinking foolishly in the TV lights and wondering how the hell he came up with the idea of pre-sliced bread in the first place.

In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three … many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.

Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying ‘Got rocks in your head?’ to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful.

Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are … well … human beings.

[AI pick-up lines:]
- You must be a tringle? Cause you’re the only thing here.
- Hey baby, you’re to be a key? Because I can bear your toot?
- Are you a candle? Because you’re so hot of the looks with you.
- You’re so beautiful that you say a bat on me and baby.
- You look like a thing and I love you.

Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn’t in the job.

I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. […] The Universe itself operated on the same principle.

A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practised human sacrifice, except that they didn’t really need to practise any more because they had got so good at it. City law said that only condemned criminals should be used, but that was all right because in most of the religions refusing to volunteer for sacrifice was an offence punishable by death.

The Unseen University Boat Race is a good spectator sport consisting as it does of two teams of students wearing very wide shoes running along the river from the boathouses to the Brass Bridge carrying a racing skiff. It is possible to do this since the River Ankh is so turgid it can barely be considered mobile. In earlier days the rowing clubs had a man at the helm to dig a way through the water.

Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I’ll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I’m not as stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard …

[… H]e recalled the epigram about a lecture being a process of transferring the contents of the teacher's notebook into the notebooks of the students, without allowing it to pass through the minds of either.

You can't be experimental about someone you love, any more than a sane sociologist would induce fascism in his own country just to study the consequences.

All libraries everywhere are connected in L-space. All libraries. Everywhere. And the Librarian, navigating by booksign carved on shelves by past explorers, navigating by smell, navigating even by the siren whisperings of nostalgia, was heading purposely for one very special one.

The folk of the forest, they ask it of me
How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?
And I make reply with a tear in my eye
How many tall ships sail the forest?
— Northumberland Ballad
[— The Folk of the Forest, by Michael Moorcock]

The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

Once you’ve ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right.

The world doesn’t want to know what’s happening to it as it grows beyond any sane population controls, doesn’t want to see what it’s pushing out of the dark as it spreads.

Rules for Use of the Temple of Small Gods […]
2. Worshippers are responsible for cleaning their own altars and emptying the burning pits after use. Strictly no barbecues. […]
7. Please use the locker room for shoe storage. Temple staff cannot be held responsible for any loss or infection. […]
9. Unauthorised tampering with collection boxes will be punished by holy fire, probably. Well, you never know. […]

The stars dilated, each twinkling beacon the rose window of a celestial cathedral, a pitiless eye of cold, sidereal fire. The dark spaces between hid a divine machine in which this world and everything in it were only dust, but the master of it all spoke to her.

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

Nadelman scowled as he must have scowled twenty years before to notice that the section contained another unfortunate typo, perhaps even a malicious one: “a message from beyond the veil of night” had become “a massage.”

It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are – who knows?
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled . .
It rolled a six.

People say the American dream is to own a house or a business, or whatever, they’re wrong, or they’re deluding themselves. The American dream is and always has been to shed your old life and start a new one somewhere else.

[W]e might reasonably think of the end of the world […] as a continuous and never-ending process.

Freedom, when done properly, is not necessarily easy, or nice, or expedient, it's just freedom; and the interesting thing about it is that every other citizen has it as well, which is where, of course, the fun starts.
— Lord Vetinari

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

No star burns forever. You can say “It’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

‘[…] For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, “Go on, do Deformed Rabbit … it’s my favourite.”’

Abraxas says here: “Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.”’