Terry Pratchett

Anyone with half a mind could see that," said Tiffany.Miss Tick sighed. "Yes. But sometimes it's so hard to find half a mind when you need one.

If Vorbis was right, and there was a kind of light that made darkness visible, then down there was its opposite, the darkness where no light could ever reach: darkness that blackened light, He thought of blind Didactylos and his empty lantern.

These were dangerous thoughts, he knew. They were the kind that crept up on a Watchman when the chase was over and it was just you and him, facing one another in that breathless little pinch between the crime and the punishment.And maybe a Watchman had seen civilization with the skin ripped off one time too many and stopped acting like a Watchman and started acting like a normal human being and realized that the click of the crossbow or the sweep of the sword would make all the world so clean.And you couldn__ think like that, even about vampires. Even though they__ take the lives of other people because little lives don__ matter and what the hell can we take away from them?And, too, you couldn__ think like that because they gave you a sword and a badge and that turned you into something else and that had to mean there were some thoughts you couldn__ think.Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good Watchman, Carrot always said. To light a candle in the dark.

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no cap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. presumably, he said, these must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plan to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Learnin_ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

I heard this story once," she said, "where this bloke got locked up for years and years and he learned amazin' stuff about the universe and everythin' from another prisoner who was incredibly clever, and then he escaped and got his revenge.""What incredibly clever stuff do you know about the universe, Gytha Ogg?" said Granny."Bugger all," said Nanny cheerfully."Then we'd better bloody well escape right now.

Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.

Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.

Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of thecat, although in this case there were three determinate states the catcould be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

When in doubt, choose to live.

Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words.

... a man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue...

To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.