"Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out... No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person"

"An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A‘Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis."

"You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs"

"It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows."

Pratchett was right when he said the beginning is not the place to start in the Discworld series. This and the sequel, The Light Fantastic, while serving as an introduction to a world that flies through space on the back of a turtle, I would say these first two stand alone. His writing was still that of a generic Sci-Fi author. He tried to squeeze so many ideas into these first two books. I recommend it, but not as a first glimpse into Discworld.

"It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself."