Pyramids

The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one. (p. 226)

The trouble with gods is that after enough people start believing in them, they begin to exist. And what begins to exist isn't what was originally intended. (p. 297)

Battle elephants! Teppic groaned. Tsort went in for battle elephants, too. Battle elephants were the fashion lately. They weren't much good for anything except trampling on their own when they inevitably panicked, so the military minds on both sides had responded by breeding bigger elephants. Elephants were impressive. (p. 256)

They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart. (p. 225)

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he wanted things to stay the same, as well. (p. 315)

Teppic stared into his wine mug. These men are philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no one else would consider for five seconds. On the way to the tavern Xeno had explained to him, for example, why it was logically impossible to fall out of a tree. (p. 213)

However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next.

It's a mistake trying to cheer up camels. You may as well drop meringues into a black hole. (p. 319)

The crowds were still outside. Religion had ruled in the Old Kingdom for the best part of seven thousand years. Behind the eyes of every priest present was a graphic image of what would happen if the people ever thought, for one moment, that it ruled no more. (pp. 270-271)

"You're a criminal?" said Teppic.

He [Ptaclusp] put his arms around his sons' shoulders.

Belief is a force. It's a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. (p. 202)

The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.*

Dios sat on the steps of the throne and stared gloomily at the floor. The gods didn't listen. He knew that. He knew that, of all people. But it had never mattered before. It was the ritual that was important, not the gods. The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to? (p. 271)

From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.

Ptraci didn't just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations and melted the bridges for scrap. (p. 243)

She had a number of stoutly-held views on a variety of subjects, but most of them involved the flaying alive of people she disapproved of. This meant most people under the age of thirty-five, to start with. (p. 310)

Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the "Marie Celeste", and the chuck keys for electric drills. (p. 230)

No one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it's like having the auditors in unexpectedly. (p. 203)

Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. (p. 175)

Just because fate throws you together doesn't mean fate's got it right. (p. 312)

What he wanted, he decided, was a priest. They had to be useful for something, and this seemed the sort of time one might need one. For solace, or possibly, he felt obscurely, to beat their head in with a rock. (p. 303)

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

The Sphinx is an unreal creature. It exists solely because it has been imagined. (p. 264)

The noise stopped, filling the air with the dark metallic clang of sudden silence. (p. 301)

"Therefore I will have dinner sent in," said the priest. "It will be roast chicken."

Those first pyramids had been built by human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium, who had cut rocks into pieces and then painfully put them back together again in a better shape. (p. 96)

Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language. No, we do it for the money. And because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money. There can be few cleaner motives, shorn of all pretense.(p. 46)

His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centred as a gyroscope. (p. 29)

Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid. (p. 135)

The king looked surprised.

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free. (p. 35)

"Well, yes," said the IIa, very embarrassed, because interfering with the divine flow of money was alien to his personal religion. (p. 154)

That was extremely symbolic as well, although no one could remember what of. (p. 62)

It's a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the job spec.

Funny, that. When he was alive it had all seemed so sensible, so obvious. Now he was dead it looked a huge waste of effort. (p. 71)

It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations. (p. 171)

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification. (p. 6)

Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do. (p. 77)

Whatever his eyes were focused on wasn't occupying the usual set of dimensions. (p. 65)

'Kiddo? I'll have you know the blood of Pharaohs runs in my veins!'

A few stars had been let out early. Teppic looked up at them. Perhaps, he thought, there is life somewhere else. On the stars, maybe. If it's true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere.

No one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum. (p. 3)

When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions. (p. 58)

The important thing is not how many people you inhume, it's how many fail to inhume you. (pp. 20-21)

All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed. (p. 5)

The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterward. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible. (p. 56)

You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated. (p. 100)

"Are you all right, O jeweled master of the sun?" one of them ventured.