Mort

You know, people just don't see what their mind tells them isn't there.

When you're a god, you don't have to have reasons.

History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

He was suddenly aware that he had made some lifelong enemies, and it was no consolation to know that he probably wouldn't have them for very long.

What's the use of having the power if you don't wield it? Man doesn't show you respect, you don't leave enough of his damn inn to roast chestnuts on, understand?

It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe.

There were more than nine hundred known gods on the Disc, and research theologians were discovering more every year.

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

Truly, he thought, the way of enlightenment is like unto half a mile of broken glass.

The world's greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents. However, the gods took pity on them, and turned her into an ironing board, and him into a small brass bollard.

Resolution was good for the moral fiber; the only trouble was the fiber didn't appreciate the sacrifices he was making for it.

There were temples, their doors wide open, filling the streets with the sound of gongs, cymbals and, in the case of some of the more conservative fundamentalist religions, the brief screams of the victims.

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe... which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.

It wasn't that he was unhelpful, but he had the kind of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread.