Your whole life passes in front of your eyes before you die. This is called living.

But what's worth more than gold?" "Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren't you worth more than that?

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.

People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.