Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

He's probably their battle poet, too." "You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?" "No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy....When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode.

Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already.

Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.

He moved on, in the centre of a widening circle. He wasn't an enemy, he was a nemesis.