Eric by Terry Pratchett
There is nowhere Death will not go, no matter how distant and dangerous. In fact the more dangerous it is, the more likely he is to be there already. (E)
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they didn’t own their own horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops. (E)
All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can’t simply be chained to the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates. Or, in the case of the volumes on tantric sex magic for the serious connoisseur, kept under very cold water to stop them bursting into flames and scorching their severely plain covers. (E)
...any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake. (E)
Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters. (E)
…the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight. (E)
Hell needed horribly bright, self-centred people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage. (E)
He had the kind of subjects who used the words ‘find out’ when they meant ‘ascertain’. Damnation was too good for them. (E)
Rincewind tried some. It was a bowl of cereal, nuts, and dried fruit. He didn’t have any quarrel with any of that. It was just that somewhere in the preparation something had apparently been done to these innocent ingredients what it takes a million gravities to do to a neutron star. If you died of eating this sort of thing they wouldn’t have to bury you, they would just need to drop you somewhere where the ground was soft. (E)
There might have been more efficient ways to build a world. You might start with a ball of molten iron and then coat it with successive layers of rock, like an old-fashioned gobstopper. And you’d have a very efficient planet, but it wouldn’t look so nice. Besides, things would drop off the bottom. (E)
...so many things had happened to him recently he was prepared to concede that he might have died and not noticed it in the confusion... (E)
Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, "Where’s my clean socks?", no-one answers. (E)
Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind’s talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn’t matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I’ll still be. (E)
He could shout ‘help!’ in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve. He had passed through many countries on the Disc, some of them at high speed, and during the long, lovely, boring hours when he’d worked in the Library he’d whiled away the time by reading up on all the exotic and faraway places he’d never visited. He remembered that at the time he’d sighed with relief that he’d never have to visit them. (E)
In the jungles of central Klatch there are, indeed, lost kingdoms of mysterious Amazonian princesses who capture male explorers for specifically masculine duties. These are indeed rigorous and exhausting and the luckless victims do not last long.*
*This is because wiring plugs, putting up shelves, sorting out the funny noises in attics and mowing lawns can eventually reduce even the strongest constitution. (E)
Rincewind growled. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was people who were fearless in the face of death. It seemed to strike at something absolutely fundamental in him. (E)
The Luggage had a straightforward way of dealing with things between it and its intended destination: it ignored them. (E)
Rincewind sighed. He’d tried to make his basic philosophy clear time and again, and people never got the message.
“Don’t you worry about to,” he said. “In my experience that always takes care of itself. The important word is away.” (E)
The even harder part was getting the café owner to accept a coin bearing the head of someone whose great-great-great grandfather wasn’t born yet. Fortunately, Rincewind was able to persuade the man that the future was another country. (E)
It’s funny how the people have always respected the kind of commander who comes up with strategies like "I want fifty thousand of you chappies to rush at the enemy," whereas the more thoughtful commanders who say things like "Why don’t we build a damn great wooden horse and then nip in at the back gate while they’re all round the thing waiting for us to come out" are considered only one step above common oiks and not the kind of person you’d lend money to. (E)
The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking. (E)
‘But I read where she was the most beautiful –’
‘Ah well,’ said the sergeant. ‘If you’re going to go around reading –’
‘The thing is,’ said Rincewind quickly, ‘it’s what they call dramatic necessity. No-one’s going to be interested in a war fought over a, a quite pleasant lady, moderately attractive in a good light. Are they?’
Eric was nearly in tears.
‘But it said her face launched a thousand ships –’
‘That’s what you call metaphor,’ said Rincewind.
‘Lying,’ the sergeant explained, kindly. (E)
… raw matter is continually flowing into the universe in fairly developed forms, popping into existence normally in ashtrays, vases and glove compartments. It chooses its shape to allay suspicion, and common manifestations are paperclips, the pins out of shirt packaging, the little keys for central heating radiators, marbles, bits of crayon, mysterious sections of herb-chopping devices and old Kate Bush albums. (E)
‘Some people’ – and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past – ‘think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is.’ (E)
‘What’re quantum mechanics?’
‘I don’t know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.’ (E)
He had looked death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly-retreating head many times... (E)
‘Multiple exclamation marks,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘are a sure sign of a diseased mind.’ (E)
Nightmares are usually rather daft things and it’s very hard to explain to a listener what was so dreadful about your socks coming alive or giant carrots jumping out of the hedgerows. (E)
Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.
This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many demons, who had always thought that hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on. (E)
Now he realised what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them. For boredom to be enjoyable there had to be something to compare it with. (E)
‘I never look back,’ said Rincewind firmly. ‘One of the first rules of running away is, never look back.’ (E)
Possibly this made it angrier, although with the Luggage there wasn’t any reliable way of telling because it spent all its time beyond, in a manner of speaking, the hostility event horizon. (E)
Expressions twitched as the lords made up their minds like a row of dominoes falling over. There were some things on which even they were united. No more policy statements, no more consultative documents, no more morale-boosting messages to all staff. This was Hell, but you had to draw the line somewhere. (E)
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they didn’t own their own horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops. (E)
All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can’t simply be chained to the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates. Or, in the case of the volumes on tantric sex magic for the serious connoisseur, kept under very cold water to stop them bursting into flames and scorching their severely plain covers. (E)
...any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake. (E)
Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters. (E)
…the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight. (E)
Hell needed horribly bright, self-centred people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage. (E)
He had the kind of subjects who used the words ‘find out’ when they meant ‘ascertain’. Damnation was too good for them. (E)
Rincewind tried some. It was a bowl of cereal, nuts, and dried fruit. He didn’t have any quarrel with any of that. It was just that somewhere in the preparation something had apparently been done to these innocent ingredients what it takes a million gravities to do to a neutron star. If you died of eating this sort of thing they wouldn’t have to bury you, they would just need to drop you somewhere where the ground was soft. (E)
There might have been more efficient ways to build a world. You might start with a ball of molten iron and then coat it with successive layers of rock, like an old-fashioned gobstopper. And you’d have a very efficient planet, but it wouldn’t look so nice. Besides, things would drop off the bottom. (E)
...so many things had happened to him recently he was prepared to concede that he might have died and not noticed it in the confusion... (E)
Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, "Where’s my clean socks?", no-one answers. (E)
Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind’s talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn’t matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I’ll still be. (E)
He could shout ‘help!’ in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve. He had passed through many countries on the Disc, some of them at high speed, and during the long, lovely, boring hours when he’d worked in the Library he’d whiled away the time by reading up on all the exotic and faraway places he’d never visited. He remembered that at the time he’d sighed with relief that he’d never have to visit them. (E)
In the jungles of central Klatch there are, indeed, lost kingdoms of mysterious Amazonian princesses who capture male explorers for specifically masculine duties. These are indeed rigorous and exhausting and the luckless victims do not last long.*
*This is because wiring plugs, putting up shelves, sorting out the funny noises in attics and mowing lawns can eventually reduce even the strongest constitution. (E)
Rincewind growled. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was people who were fearless in the face of death. It seemed to strike at something absolutely fundamental in him. (E)
The Luggage had a straightforward way of dealing with things between it and its intended destination: it ignored them. (E)
Rincewind sighed. He’d tried to make his basic philosophy clear time and again, and people never got the message.
“Don’t you worry about to,” he said. “In my experience that always takes care of itself. The important word is away.” (E)
The even harder part was getting the café owner to accept a coin bearing the head of someone whose great-great-great grandfather wasn’t born yet. Fortunately, Rincewind was able to persuade the man that the future was another country. (E)
It’s funny how the people have always respected the kind of commander who comes up with strategies like "I want fifty thousand of you chappies to rush at the enemy," whereas the more thoughtful commanders who say things like "Why don’t we build a damn great wooden horse and then nip in at the back gate while they’re all round the thing waiting for us to come out" are considered only one step above common oiks and not the kind of person you’d lend money to. (E)
The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking. (E)
‘But I read where she was the most beautiful –’
‘Ah well,’ said the sergeant. ‘If you’re going to go around reading –’
‘The thing is,’ said Rincewind quickly, ‘it’s what they call dramatic necessity. No-one’s going to be interested in a war fought over a, a quite pleasant lady, moderately attractive in a good light. Are they?’
Eric was nearly in tears.
‘But it said her face launched a thousand ships –’
‘That’s what you call metaphor,’ said Rincewind.
‘Lying,’ the sergeant explained, kindly. (E)
… raw matter is continually flowing into the universe in fairly developed forms, popping into existence normally in ashtrays, vases and glove compartments. It chooses its shape to allay suspicion, and common manifestations are paperclips, the pins out of shirt packaging, the little keys for central heating radiators, marbles, bits of crayon, mysterious sections of herb-chopping devices and old Kate Bush albums. (E)
‘Some people’ – and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past – ‘think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is.’ (E)
‘What’re quantum mechanics?’
‘I don’t know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.’ (E)
He had looked death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly-retreating head many times... (E)
‘Multiple exclamation marks,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘are a sure sign of a diseased mind.’ (E)
Nightmares are usually rather daft things and it’s very hard to explain to a listener what was so dreadful about your socks coming alive or giant carrots jumping out of the hedgerows. (E)
Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.
This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many demons, who had always thought that hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on. (E)
Now he realised what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them. For boredom to be enjoyable there had to be something to compare it with. (E)
‘I never look back,’ said Rincewind firmly. ‘One of the first rules of running away is, never look back.’ (E)
Possibly this made it angrier, although with the Luggage there wasn’t any reliable way of telling because it spent all its time beyond, in a manner of speaking, the hostility event horizon. (E)
Expressions twitched as the lords made up their minds like a row of dominoes falling over. There were some things on which even they were united. No more policy statements, no more consultative documents, no more morale-boosting messages to all staff. This was Hell, but you had to draw the line somewhere. (E)
