Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.

The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.

Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

Winners never talk about glorious victories. Thats because they're the ones who see what the battle field looks like afterwards. Its only the losers who have glorious victories.

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.