That's one form of magic, of course." "What, just knowing things?" "Knowing things that other people don't know.

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.

You have reached the end of cake

Any sensible ruler would have killed off Leonard, and Lord Vetinari was extremely sensible and often wondered why he had not done so. He'd decided that it was because, imprisoned in the priceless, inquiring amber of Leonard's massive mind, underneath that bright investigative genius was a kind of willful innocence that might in lesser men be called stupidity. It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millennia, had caused mankind to stick its fingers in the electric light socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened - and then be very surprised when it did.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate . . .)

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.