Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

Page 33:

Johnny hesitated. I could turn around now, he thought, and go home. And if I turn around, I’ll never find out what happens next. I’ll go away and I’ll never know why it happened now and what would have happened next. I’ll go away and grow up and get a job and get married and have children and become a granddad and retire and take up bowling and go into Sunshine Acres and watch daytime television until I die, and I’ll never know. And he thought: Perhaps I did. Perhaps that all happened and then, just when I was dying, some kind of angel turned up and said would you like a wish? And I said, yes, I’d like to know what would have happened if I hadn’t run away, and the angel said, Okay, you can go back. And here I am, back again. I can’t let myself down. The world waited.

Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

Opening lines:

Johnny never knew for certain why he started seeing the dead. The Alderman said it was probably because he was too lazy not to.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

Page 33:

‘You mean it was some sort of metaphor?’

Smeens handled this quite well in the circumstances, which included being so deeply at sea that barnacles would be attracted to his underwear. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It could be a meta for something that didn’t look so stupid.’

Truth is female, since truth is beauty rather than handsomeness; this, Ridcully reflected as the Council grumbled in, would certainly explain the saying that a lie could run round the world before Truth has got its, correction, her boots on, since she would have to choose which pair – the idea that any woman in a position to choose would have just one pair of boots being beyond rational belief. Indeed, as a goddess she would have lots of shoes, and thus many choices: comfy shoes for home truths, hobnail boots for unpleasant truths, simple clogs for universal truths and possibly some kind slipper for self-evident truth. More important right now was what kind of truth he going to have to impart to his colleagues, and he decided not on the whole truth, but instead on nothing but the truth, which dispensed with the need for honesty.