“Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.”

“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.”

“We've had to deal with so many complications. We're still dealing with them. And what can we do? Nothing - well, unless we take your side's point of view and make deals with the devil. But why? Why can't we make deals with God? People do all the time. 'God, if you do this for me, I promise to be good.' Stuff like that.Yeah, but I don't see any contracts like you guys have. No hard evidence that it works. How come we can only get things we want by being bad? Why can't we get them by being good?”

“Getting on with her life is important. But right now it may be more important to put the feelings out there, deal with them, and find a way to be okay with all that's happened.”

“There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.”

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”