Daily Digest

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”

“This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.”

“Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.”

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

“Progress just means bad things happen faster.”

“Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?”

“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.”

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

“There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer? And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye.”

“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”

“Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them”

“The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.”

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”

“I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.”

“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”

“I ain’t against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they’ve got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take ’em to bits for the parts when we don’t need ’em anymore, see?”

“Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there. Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ'ᴛ ʜᴇᴀʀᴅ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bᴀʏ Oғ Mᴀɴᴛᴇ, ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ? he said. “No, sir,” said Mort. Fᴀᴍᴏᴜs sʜɪᴘᴡʀᴇᴄᴋ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ. “Was there?” Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ, said Death, ɪғ I ᴄᴀɴ ғɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀᴍɴ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ.”

“The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.”

“Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.”

“I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.”

“IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT /MEANT/ TO BE SAFE.”

“An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.”

“The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.”

“People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.”

“He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.”

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”

“The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.”

“Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.”

“Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.”

“The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.”

“He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'”

“Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.”

“There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.”

“It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.”

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...”

“I was a very keen reader of science fiction.”