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.

Thats how we survive infinity - we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races... very handy.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.

Do you think there’s anything to eat in this forest?” “Yes,” said the wizard bitterly, “us.