Terry Pratchett

"Anyway, it'll be int'resting to see if it works."

It was no longer the full-nosed roaring of a forty-winks catnapper, but the well-paced growling of someone who wanted to make a night of it.

The nobles of Genua had enough experience to know what it means when a ruler says something is not compulsory. (p. 325).

The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays. (p. 282)

Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government. (p. 176)

For wolves and pigs and bears, thinking that they're human is a tragedy. For a cat, it's an experience. (p. 268).

"Listen, happy endings is fine if they turn out happy," said Granny, glaring at the sky. "But you can't make 'em for other people. Like the only way you could make a happy marriage is by cuttin' their heads off as soon as they say ‘I do', yes? You can't make happiness..."

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?

All witches are very conscious of stories. They can feel stories, in the same way that a bather in a little pool can feel the unexpected trout.

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)

Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy seraph of Al-Ybi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered. (p. 6)

She heard Nanny say: "Beats me why they're always putting invisible runes on their doors. I mean, you pays some wizard to put invisible runes on your door, and how do you know you've got value for money?"