People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered able to answer, such as ‘Is this the laundry?’ ‘How do you spell surreptitious?’ and, on a regular basis: ‘Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.’ (GP)Īnd then thlabber happened. …it’s always worrying to see a journalist take a sudden interest in what you’re saying, especially when you half suspect it was a load of pigeon guano. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you know how easy it is. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards – not ‘not doing magic’ because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could and didn’t. …every undelivered message is a piece of space-time that lacks another end, a little bundle of effort and emotion floating freely. Women are always significantly under-represented in secret orders. …the man had reached the ‘jolly drunk’ stage and was singing the kind of song that’s hilarious to rugby players and children aged under eleven… (GP) Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money.’ (GP)

We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. 'Money is not a thing, it is not even a process. ‘No sane mortal is truly free, because true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes.’ (GP)

‘Freedom may be mankind’s natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling.’ (GP) In the same way, the man climbing out of your window in a stripy jumper, a mask and a great hurry might merely be lost on the way to a fancy-dress party, and the man in the wig and robes at the focus of the courtroom might only be a transvestite who wandered in out of the rain. …Mr Horsefry might well have been a kind, generous and pious man. There is a saying ‘You can’t fool an honest man’ which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.

Terry pratchett postal