Цитаты из книги Hogfather

Susan stood by the fireplace.
<…>Death considered as an individual rather than life’s final curtain was someone she couldn’t help liking, in a strange kind of way.
Even so…

The pigs galloped on.

“Nighty-night,” said Albert.
<…>
And they were gone.

SHE SAYS SHE IS FIVE YEARS OLD.
“In years, yes. In cynicism, she’s about thirty-five.

Death leaned down. She stared up into the blue glow of his eyes.
YOU ARE KEEPING WELL? he said.
“Yes.”
SELF-RELIANT? MAKING YOUR OWN WAY IN THE WORLD?
“Yes!”

A couple of days earlier she’d taken the children to the Hogfather’s Grotto in one of the big shops in The Maul.
<…>
There had been people dressed up as pixies, and a picket outside the shop by the Campaign for Equal Heights.
The CEH was always ready to fight for the rights of the differently tall,

But it was always the case, wasn’t it?

There was far more to genetics than little squirmy spirals.
She could walk through walls when she really had to. She could use a tone of voice that was more like actions than words, that somehow reached inside people and operated all the right switches. And her hair…
That had only happened recently, though. It used to be unmanageable, but at around the age of seventeen she had found it more or less managed itself.

She hadn’t known then that her father had been Death’s apprentice for a while, and that her mother was Death’s adopted daughter.

THE HOGFATHER IS…UNAVAILABLE.
“Unavailable? At Hogswatch?”
YES.

Death looked nervous.
ALBERT SAID IT WOULD HELP ME GET INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE THING. ER…IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN—

“I mean it’s a time when humans are really human,” she said. “And they don’t want a…a skeleton at the feast! Especially one, I might add, who’s wearing a false beard and has got a damn cushion shoved up his robe! I mean, why?”

That was even more frightening than the times when, after a complicated landing, you found yourself walking up by stepping down the underside of a stair and the distant floor now hung overhead like a ceiling. He’d noticed that even the other men shut their eyes when that happened. Teatime, though, took those stairs three at a time, laughing like a kid with a new toy.

“He’s barricaded himself in,” said Chickenwire.
Teatime tapped on it. “You in there,” he said. “Come on out.

The tower—if that’s what it was, he thought; he was used to the odd architecture at Unseen University
<…>
No fewer than four spiral staircases climbed the inside, crisscrossing on landings and occasionally passing through one another in defiance of generally accepted physics.

“Fascinating,” said Teatime. “You make it look so easy.”

Sideney hadn’t hated Ronnie. He’d been too frightened. He’d wanted to be his friend. Oh, so much.

There it was again. The change in the weather of the mind, a sensation of tangible time…

“That wasn’t as much fun as the one last month,” said Gawain,

“I’ll be off, then,” it said. “Er. Happy Hogswatch.”