You can't trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.

Insanity is catching.

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has it's own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?

Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.

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

But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.