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A hundred April winds disperse her fragrance,
A thousand wet Octobers scour her footprints,
The ruthless years assail the ancient memory of her presence, yet
Where Yidhra walks the hills do not forget.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Some of the pyramids were small, and made of rough-hewn blocks that contrived to look far older than the mountains that fenced the valley from the high desert. […] But 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.

Whale Bay […] is home to the Great Blues Whale, so named for its sorrowful disposition and doleful songs. These great beasts are hunted, but not for their meat or blubber, though that is a useful by-product: they are slaughtered mostly to silence them. Their gloomy choruses echoing through freezing fog and frozen landscape often prove too much for the exhausted and struggling inhabitants of this inhospitable land.

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.

Those who wait in watery R'lyeh, those who walk the snowy wastes of Leng, whistlers and lurkers of sullen Kadath--all shall rise, all shall join once more in praise of Great Cthulhu, of Shub-Niggurath, of Him Who is not to be Named. You shall help me, fellow breather of air, fellow holder of warmth, another storer of seed for the last sowing and the endless harvest.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

When the retina of the eye is stimulated by light, pressure, heat, electricity or any other irritation, the corresponding sensations are not specifically those of light, pressure, heat, electricity etc., but merely sensations of sight [… I]f you apply a stimulus to the clergywife’s essential nucleus, no matter by what means, it will start crocheting; if however it is left undisturbed […] it merely reproduces.

We dreamthieves have made something of a science of a trade which logically can tolerate no consistent laws. It has enabled us to pursue our craft with some success largely, I suspect, because we are able, to a degree, to impose our own wills upon the chaos we encounter.

That’s the trouble with land, [i]t’s got too many people on it.

Let me be destroyed. Let me merely become an unthinking extension of my ancestors. The puppet of ghosts and memories, dancing to strings which extend back through time for ten thousand years.

There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

You simplify the multiverse. Neither Law nor Chaos are forces for good or evil in themselves. It is the use to which they are put by mortals that determines those qualities…

[T]he lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder.

Out there nothing exists as yet. If you venture into it, you will be confronted again by creatures of your hidden fancy, for there is nothing else to behold. […] Once in a while […] there comes a man […] who can withstand such an ordeal. Then may the frontiers of the world be extended, for when a man stands against Chaos it must recede and new lands spring into being!

Next day I understood more clearly. I could never be at peace again till I had written my charge against the gods. It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.

‘Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.’

Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it.

No self-respecting High Priest is going to go through all the business with the trumpets and the processions and the banners and everything, and then shove his knife into a daffodil and a couple of plums. You’ve got to face it, all this stuff about golden boughs and the cycles of nature and stuff just boils down to sex and violence, usually at the same time.

I have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

Many of the books were magical, and the important thing to remember about grimoires is that they are deadly in the hands of any librarian who cares about order, because he’s bound to stick them all on the same shelf. This is not a good idea with books that tend to leak magic, because more than one or two of them together form a critical Black Mass.

Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals, which were sown this year to come up later this year, biennials, sown this year to grow next year, and perennials, sown this year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could be planted this year to come up last year.

These be nott manifest, but They do wait in patience for a tyme that ys nott yet. Of a hydeous potency be ye blackness wherein They dwell, for They do nott always sleep. […] Beneath that far Northe, in ye ancient tymes yclept Hyperborea, do They wait. Afar in ye East, beneath vaste plateaus, They be rumoured. In ye new darke lands across ye seas They surely be.
— Monstres and Their Kynde

Rescuing beleaguered maidens had a certain passing reward, but most of the time he'd finished up by setting them up in some city somewhere with a handsome dowry, because after a while even the most agreeable ex-maiden became possessive and had scant sympathy for his efforts to rescue her sister sufferers.

No people less romantic than the Phœnicians ever lived, but for the moment all the world seemed bathed in a rosy glow, life with its hard realities melted into a swimming dream, perfumed, iridescent, with clouds under winged feet and bodies light as air.

Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting "All gods are bastards".

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.