Terry Pratchett

"Look, I'll be frank," he said. "I could point you in the direction of a great brothel."

"Sodomy non sapiens," said Albert under his breath.

[Death pays for something from a large bag of assorted copper coinage, most of it turned blue and green with age]

Albert glared at him. "Shut up."

"I've—we've got a special on Cutwell's Shield of Passion ointment," said the face, and winked in a startling fashion. "Provides your wild oats while guaranteeing a crop failure, if you know what I mean."

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.

Although the scythe isn't preeminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome. Once its owner gets it weaving and spinning no one—including the wielder—is quite certain where the blade is now and where it will be next.

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.

Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn't entirely there.

"I suppose you wouldn't happen to know the way out of the forest, possibly, by any chance?"

Weems might have had a room-temperature IQ, but he knew idiocy when he saw it.

He wanted to say all this, and couldn't. For a man with an itch to see the whole of infinity, Twoflower never actually moved outside his own head. Telling him the truth would be like kicking a spaniel.