Reaper Man/Quotes

"No one was avoiding him, it was just that an apparent random Brownian motion was gently moving everyone away."

"People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory."

"He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat."

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."

"It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom."

"What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?"

"One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don’t want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people? One said, Got a crush on them, sort of thing?"

"Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone."

"Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed."

""Windle!” he said. “We thought you were dead!” He had to admit that it wasn’t a very good line. You didn’t put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they’ve got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour."

"It took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place."

"The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “I haven’t felt like this since Mrs. Cake was one of my flock.” Archchancellor Ridcully: “Mrs. Cake? What’s a Mrs. Cake?” The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “You have . . . ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?” Archchancellor Ridcully: “Yes.” The Chief Priest of Blind Io: “We have someone called Mrs. Cake.”"

"It was another day. Cyril the cockerel stirred on his perch. The chalked words glowed in the half light. He concentrated. He took a deep breath. “Dock-a-loodle-fod!” Now that the memory problem was solved, there was only the dyslexia to worry about."

"It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny."

"Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason."

"No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly-wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids."

"Traditionally, only two people ever went into the innermost sanctuary. They were the High Priest and the other priest who wasn’t High. They had been there for years, and took turns at being the high one."

"No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."

"On the fabled hidden continent of Xxxx, somewhere near the rim, there is a lost colony of wizards who wear corks around their pointy hats and live on nothing but prawns."

""You know," said Windle, "it's a wonderful afterlife.""

""Being needed is important.

"I don't know. How should I know? Because we're all in this together, I suppose. Because we don't leave our people in there. Because you're a long time dead. Because anything is better than being alone. Because humans are human.""