“She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized (fossils were well known on the Discworld, great spiraled shells and badly constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadow of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.”

“Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.”

“There were people who’d steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.”

“Adam looked at Them. They were his kind of people, too.You just had to decide who your friends really were.”

“But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.”

“In fact, if there were such a thing as an international thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone's wallets.”

“If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone’s wallets.”