“Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.”

“Funny, reely," he said. "You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know.”

“For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.”

“It's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave... you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.”

“Ach, people are always telling us not to do things" said Rob Anybody, "that's how we ken the most interesting things to do.”

“How do they rise up?”

“They writes some bits o’ their letters in them wee codies. That’s a terrible thing tae do to a reader. It’s hard enough readin’ the normal words, wi’oot somebody jumblin’ them all up.”