“Anyway, Angua seemed to have taken this case personally. She always had a soft spot for the underdog.So did Vimes. You had to. Not because they were pure or noble, because they weren't. You had to be on the side of underdogs because they weren't overdogs.”

“That's what hope was. Clinging to something you weren't sure would ever be yours. But you had to hold on anyway, because without it, what was the point?”

“It was the same old crap-someone thinking they can push you around because you're young, because you're helpless. You had to just sit there and take it because you were under a certain number, because you weren't a real person yet; you could be picked up and dropped like a toy, left behind or thrown away-”

“It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren't a woman. Weren't even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women.”

“It must have taken years of inside meaness to soak to her outside, because she had a bad case of ugly. ---Shug ”

“She always had to have someone to love...She couldn't seem to believe that anyone could really love her. She always thought it was because she was a star, not just because of her herself, and she always had to be reassured.”