“So I suggest you cut the cackle and come to the horses.”

“So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.”

“If you are going to go through hell...I suggest you come back learning something.”

“Before the gods that made the gods had seen their sunrise pass, the white horse of the white horse vale was cut out of the grass”

“Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers,, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that's what it was really like.”

“...and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible heartrending sobs.”