People don't like to say Horror so they say Dark Fantasy because that's Horror wearing a collar and tie.

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Humans need fantasy in order to be human.

It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.

You are very clever,' said the old man shyly. 'I would like to eat your brains, one day,' For some reason the books of etiquette that Daphne's grandmother had forced on her didn't quite deal with this. Of course, silly people would say to babies, 'You're so sweet I could gobble you all up!', but that sort of nonsense seemed less funny when it was said by a man in war paint who owned more than one skull. Daphne, cursed with good manners, settled for, 'It's very kind of you to say so.

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.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.