Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2)

by Terry Pratchett

I tell you, it’s hell in my workshop! There’s stuff whizzing everywhere! Just before I came out, a huge and very expensive piece of glassware broke into splinters!” “Marry, ’twas a sharp retort,” said a wretched voice.

Maybe life is something you acquire.

In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

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.