Reaper Man

In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Morris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring. They don't dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?

In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. (pp. 316-317)

Mothers like her exist everywhere, and apparently nothing can be done about them. (p. 313)

There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another—language was just there to hide their thoughts. (p. 319)

He lay back and smiled. It was never too late to have a good life. (p. 311)

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (p. 321)

Death said nothing. He helped her up onto the horse.

With any luck, they'd have best of both worlds. Not just feeling...but knowing.

What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up? (p. 305)

"I suppose there's not some kind of magic you don't know about?"

His voice shook with rage.

Then there was a silence. It was the particularly wary silence of something making no noise. (p. 124)

Was that justice? Was that a proper reward for being a firm believer in reincarnation for almost 130 years? You come back as a corpse?

The Dean himself didn't know when he'd been happier. For sixty years he'd been obeying all the self-regulating rules of wizardry, and suddenly he was having the time of his life. He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat. (p. 242)

Every day took an age to go by, which was odd, because days plural went past like a stampede. (p. 13)

In the hall of the house of Death is a clock with a pendulum like a blade but with no hands, because in the house of Death there is no time but the present. (There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. It was just an older one.) (p. 14)

"Seems to me...seems to me...look, death must be going on, right? Death has to happen. That's what bein' alive is all about. You're alive, and then you're dead. It can't just stop happening." (p. 43)

The Archchancellor was the first one to recover.

Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. (p. 262)

In a general sort of way everyone knew they were going to die, even the common people. No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched. (pp. 11-12)

"Huh! Priests!" said Mr. Shoe. "They're all the same. Always telling you that you're going to live again after you're dead, but you just try it and see the look on their faces!" (p. 131)

Everything that exists, yearns to live. That's what the cycle of life is all about. That's the engine that drives the great biological pumps of evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the very top—which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all that effort. (p. 81)

He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn't happen to you every year. (p. 182)

"It's not old Windle. Old Windle was a lot older!"

William Spigot was the one that sang when he worked, breaking into that long nasal whine which meant that folk song was about to be perpetrated. (p. 203)

Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying, "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees. (p. 28)

"But how can a city be alive? It's only made up of dead parts!" said Ludmilla.

That was the bloody trouble, every time. Whenever someone was trying to do a bit of sensible thinking, there was always some pointless distraction. (p. 212)

"It can't be intelligent, can it?" said the Bursar.

Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn't mean stupid. It just means that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges. (p. 297)

Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever, changed his mind about anything. The other was that 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. (p. 38)

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?

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 hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids. (p. 301)

Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen.

The senior wizards know that the proper purpose of magic is to form a social pyramid with the wizards on top of it, eating big dinners. (p. 189)

It was, as he was wonderfully well placed to know, merely putting off the inevitable. But wasn't that what living was all about? (p. 277)

Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason. (p. 159)