Animated clay golem Dorfl debates his nature with the city's leading priesthood.

>'We're not listening to you! You're not even really alive!' said a priest.

> Dorfl nodded. 'This Is Fundamentally True,' he said.

>'See? He admits it!'

>'I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom of Life - '

>'True! Let's do it!'

>'However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.'

-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

(Much later in the series the elemental personification of the winter thought to make himself a human body by collecting and including a shopping list of chemical ingredients into a snowman. What Dorfl clearly understood, he missed completely. If only he'd got the idea, things might have gone differently with the witch he pined for. Too bad... frost to fire.)