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He spent his leisure time in writing—studies of obscure periods in forgotten history that, when published, merely added to the clutter of the world’s huge mental lumber-room, to judge by the reviews.

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

[T]he old and ancient writers did affirm, that Fortune was stark blind without eyes, because she always bestoweth her riches upon evil persons, and fools, and chooseth or favoureth no mortal person by judgment […] she showeth such evil or contrary opinions in men, that the wicked do glory with the name of good, and contrary the good and innocent be detracted and slandered as evil.

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

DIALLO: You’ve been acting since you were very young, isn’t that right?
RAYMONDE: Very young. I was in a commercial when I was three. Do you remember commercials?
DIALLO: I do, regrettably.

I will declare how one by hap
his human figure lost,
And how in brutish formed shape
his loathed life he tossed.
And how he was in course of time
from such a state unfold,
Who eftsoons turn’d to pristine shape,
his lot unlucky told.

In Traverse City Kirsten had stared at the This webpage is not available message on the screen. She didn’t seriously believe that the inventor would be able to find the Internet, but she was fascinated by electricity.

“What is the point of anything?” unhelpfully returned the witch. “Flesh is dust, life unreal, an illusion, a play we are at.”

For the mind of Man alone is free to explore the lofty vastness of the cosmic infinite, to transcend ordinary consciousness, or roam the subterranean corridors of the human brain with its boundless dimensions. And universe and individual are linked, the one mirrored in the other, and each contains the other.
-- The Chronicle of the Black Sword.

She yearned to die, but had not the courage to accomplish it. She yearned to live, and knew this was to be denied her.

The pomp of the proceedings otherwise discomforted Pereban. He had been used to modest and apologetic festivals of death, whereat the gods’ forgiveness was asked for the temerity of having lived at all.

Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier believes in nothing. Or rather, if he believes in anything, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This cannot be denied by any rational man.

And he sang how in the beginning the earth and the heaven and the sea
In the selfsame form were blended together in unity,
And how baleful contention each from other asunder tore;
And he sang of the goal of the course in the firmament fixed evermore
For the stars and the moon, and the printless paths of the journeying sun,
And how the mountains arose, how rivers that babbling run […]

“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!