“The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.”

“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...”

“The river, it's banks as yet untamed wandered languidly through thickets of rush and papyrus. Ibises waded in the shallows; in the deeps hippos rose and sank slowly like pickled eggs.”

“The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.”

“As the eye of narrative drew back from the coffin on its stand, two things happened. One happened comparatively slowly, and this was Vargo's realisation that he never recalled the coffin having a pillow before.The other was Greebo deciding that he was as mad as hell and wasn't going to take it any more.”

“But what's worth more than gold?""Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren't you worth more than that?”

“That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all is truth beauty and is beauty truth, and does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if there's no one there to hear it, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.”