She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

The conflict is not between Christianity and Islam or between East and West - instead, it is between stupid people and other stupid people.

Magic never dies. It merely fades away.

I would like permission to fetch a note from my mother, sir' Ridcully sighed. 'Rincewind, you once informed me, to my everlasting puzzlement, that you never knew your mother because she ran away before you were born. Distinctly remember writing it down in my diary. Would you like another try?' 'Permission to go and find my mother?'

You will have to look a long way before you find a bunch of scum-suckers more greedy, humourless and deserving of death than the suits in the music business.