[Carrot] walked with a stoop. What will do that is being brought up in a gold mine run by dwarfs who thought that five feet was a good height for a ceiling.

***

All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

***

'Right, you bastards, you're... you're geography'

***

"He says, Don't you worry about Thieves' Guilds, This is all what you have to do, you walk along the Streets at Night, shouting, It's Twelve O'clock and All's Well.
I said, What if it is not all well, and he said, You bloody well find another street."

***

The Patrician was not a man you shook a finger at unless you wanted to end up being able to count only to nine.

***

"Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself," said the Patrician (...). "The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that."

***

One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves' Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.

***

The only reason you couldn't say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away.

***

[Nobby's] age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

***

Vimes: "Corporal Nobbs, why are you kicking people when they're down?"
Nobby: "Safest way, sir."

***

He couldn't help remembering how much he'd wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they'd been starving -- anything with meat on it would have done.

***

"Anti-dragon cream. Personal guarantee: if you're incinerated you get your money back, no quibble."

***

The Patrician announced a reward of fifty thousand dollars to anyone who brings him the dragon's head. Not attached to the dragon, either.

***

"I knew this cross-eyed gorgon once, oh, she was a terror. Kept turning her own nose to stone."

***

He'd had a look at Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler's dragon detectors, which consisted solely of a piece of wood on a metal stick. When the stick was burned through, you'd found your dragon. Like a lot of Cut-me-own-Throat's devices, it was completely efficient in its own special way while at the same time being totally useless.

***

"I've brought you something jolly nourishing."
Somehow Vimes imagined it would be soup. Instead it was a plate stacked high with bacon, fried potatoes and eggs. He could hear his arteries panic just by looking at it.

***

The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of conversation.

***

Lady Ramkin's bosom rose and fell like an empire.

***

...when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.

***

Dibbler: "Hot sausages, two for a dollar, made of genuine pig, why not buy one for the lady?"
Carrot: "Don't you mean pork, sir?"
Dibbler: "Manner of speaking, manner of speaking. Certainly your actual pig products."

***

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.

***

Colon: "Yeah, right. But all this business about kings and lords, it's against basic human dignity. We're all born equal. It makes me sick."
Nobby: "Never heard you talk like this before, Frederick."
Colon: "It's Sergeant Colon to you, Nobby."

***

Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn't make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300 lbs of orangutang without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.

***

Good grief. I'm watching the first ever dragon to flame backwards.

***

That's it. We tried everything else. Now we might as well try and do it by the book.

***