Ye Gods! by Tom Holt

The best definition of an immortal is someone who hasn't died yet.

Ms. Fisichelli's eyebrows shot up like share prices in April.

Telepathic communication is very rapid indeed; compared with two seasoned telepaths thinking quickly, words are second-class letters to Penzane in Dundee on a Sunday.

Jason squared his shoulders, drew the Sword of - I couldn't give a toss what it's supposed to be called, he said to himself, I shall call it Freckles - and took one step forward.

`Now then, Pol, you and I and Mary and the dog will form the rearguard, and the rest of us...'
`That only leaves me,' said Jason.
`The rest of us will form the front line contingents. Ready, Jason?'
`No.'
`Here they come.'

...in the revised version to be found in the Shorter Harvard Orthodoxy:
  (a) I think therefore I am; or
  (b) Perhaps I thought, therefore I was; but
  (c) These days, I tend to leave all that side of things to my wife

Jason, meanwhile, was getting nicely into his rhytm. He had split the Helmet of Authority, sliced the thunderbolts into mortadella, shattered the Breastplate of Power and was just about to make an end of it when...
  `Jason!' said a voice behind him. `You stop that immediately, you hear me?'
  Jason sighed very, very deeply and lowered his sword.
  `Yes, mum,' he said.

One view is that mankind has a desperate need to believe in something, preferably something so blatantly absurd that only blind, unquestioning faith will suffice - for example, the belief which sprang up in the late nineteenth century and was still widely current in Jason Derry's time and which held that human beings were not in fact created at all but were somehow the descendants of bald, mutant monkeys. The other view is that there is never anything much on television during the summer.

The plain truth of the matter is that if you put more than two or three atoms together in a confined space for any length of time, sooner or later they're going to get on each other's wick, and then they start hurling themselves about and colliding with each other. They also shout a lot, but since the science of physics is in its infancy, nobody has yet constructed an instrument sensitive enough to monitor the voices of millions of tiny atoms debating with each other whose turn it is to do the washing up. Probably just as well, if you ask me.