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The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

The Fool’s thoughts regarding the Duke in Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett

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She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.

Regarding Granny Weatherwax in Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett

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Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don’t? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and a lot of time on their hands. ‘Which prayer shall we answer today?’ they ask one another. ‘Let’s cast the dice! Hope for this one, despair for that one, and while we’re at it, let’s destroy the life of that woman over there by having sex with her in the form of a crayfish!’ I think they pull a lot of their pranks because they’re bored.

Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. 135.

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No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.

Layard, Richard. Happiness: Lessons from a new science. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. 92.

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You did what you were told or you didn’t get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn’t your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn’t your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn’t care.

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2004. 329.

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The great subversive works of children’s literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.

-Foreward, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature by Alison Lurie

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Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

–Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

(as quoted in Inkheart by Cornelia Funke)

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For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.

Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted.

Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution.

Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever.

“Curse on book thieves”, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain

(Found in Inkheart by Cornelia Funke)

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