The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates.

In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.

Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

The thing with crowns is, it isn't the putting them on that's the problem, it's the taking them off.