“Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.”

“What's it like to be really dead, I wonder. Tell me about it, won't you Dave?" "It's like being alive", he replied. "Only different." “What do you do for kicks?”, she asked. “No kicks”, he replied, shaking her head.”

“...what was important, what mattered, was not the fact of being afraid, but what you did, the choices you made, when you were afraid. And maybe that was something to do with being alive--or staying dead.”

“Procrastinating is number three on my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn't want to be, doing exactly what you didn't want to do, withe the only difference being that you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, crappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it. If you know something is inevitable, do it and get it over with. Move on. Life is short.”

“You only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics,you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention.”

“Procrastinating is number one of my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn't want to be, doing exactly what you didn't want to do, with the only difference being you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, scrappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it.”