Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett
Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until it's too late that he's been using two queens all along. (IT)
When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events – the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there – that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous. (IT)
‘I didn’t know they were noble,’ said Io.
‘They’re all very rich and have had millions of people butchered or tortured to death merely for reasons of expediency and pride,’ said the Lady.
The watching gods nodded solemnly. That was certainly noble behaviour. That was exactly what they would have done. (IT)
According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organised. (IT)
This is the butterfly of the storms.
See the wings, slightly more ragged than those of the common fritillary. In reality, thanks to the fractal nature of the universe, this means that those ragged edges are infinite – in the same way that the edge of any rugged coastline, when measured to the ultimate microscopic level, is infinitely long – or, if not infinite, then at least so close to it that Infinity can be seen on a clear day.
And therefore, if their edges are infinitely long, the wings must logically be infinitely big.
They may look the right size for a butterfly’s wings, but that’s only because human beings have always preferred common sense to logic. (IT)
Lord Vetinari was sitting in the palace gardens watching the butterflies with an expression of mild annoyance. He found something very slightly offensive about the way they just fluttered around enjoying themselves in an unprofitable way. (IT)
Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.
The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no-one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no-one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Woolly Thinking – which is like Fuzzy Logic, only less so) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too. (IT)
…education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason. (IT)
‘Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to. (IT)
‘Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn’t add to the status of the University to have an ape on the faculty?’
‘Yes,’ said Ridcully flatly. ‘You are. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.’ (IT)
‘Oh no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things we don’t understand.’
‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.’ (IT)
The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity some time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was often quite coherent, although not by normal human standards. (IT)
‘Besides…where Rincewind went’ – he lowered his voice – ‘trouble followed behind.’
Ridcully noticed that the wizards drew a little closer together.
‘Sounds all right to me,’ he said. ‘Best place for trouble, behind. You certainly don’t want it in front.’ (IT)
It was possible, if you kept on talking at the Archchancellor long enough, that some facts might squeeze through. (IT)
‘You’re all missin’ the point. He survives. You keep on tellin’ me he’s had all these adventures and he’s still alive.’
‘What do you mean? He’s got scars all over him!’
‘My point exactly, Dean. Most of ‘em on his back, too. He leaves trouble behind. Someone Up There smiles on him.’
Rincewind winced. He had always been aware that Someone Up There was doing something on him. He’d never considered it was smiling. (IT)
'I hate it when people are nice to me. It means something bad is going to happen.' (IT)
... he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where toe good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. (IT)
Ridcully assumed that anything people had time to write down couldn’t be important. (IT)
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. (IT)
‘How will I get back?’ he said.
‘Same way you went. We’ll find you and bring you out. With surgical precision.’
Rincewind groaned. He knew what surgical precision meant in Ankh-Morpork. It meant ‘to within an inch or two, accompanied by a lot of screaming, and then they pour hot tar on you just where your leg was.’ (IT)
But…if you put aside for the moment the certainty that something would definitely go horribly wrong, it looked foolproof. The trouble was that wizards were such ingenious fools. (IT)
Assassination was meat and drink to the Hunghung court; in fact, meat and drink were often the means. (IT)
‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Rincewind. ‘No problem there. I’m good at that.’ (IT)
He was no good at anything else. Wizardry was the only refuge. Well, actually he was no good at wizardry either, but at least he was definitively no good at it. He’d always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn’t do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn’t a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid. (IT)
And he probably had saved the world a few times, but it had generally happened accidentally, while he was trying to do something else. So you almost certainly didn’t actually get any karmic points for that. It probably only counted if you started out by thinking in a loud way ‘By criminy, it’s jolly well time to save the world, and no two ways about it!’ instead of ‘Oh shit, this time I’m really going to die.’ (IT)
There was something about Cohen. People caught optimism off him as though it was the common cold. (IT)
‘… I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.’
‘After being a teacher all your life?’
‘It did mean a change of perspective, yes.’
‘But...well…surely…the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death…’
Mr Saveloy brightened up. ‘Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?’ (IT)
A foot on the neck is nine points of the law. (IT)
‘Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.’ (IT)
Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, “Turn over your papers now.” (IT)
…in Rincewind’s experience there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a scream and a good ten yards’ start. (IT)
Rincewind was not politically minded but there were some things he could work out not because they were to do with politics but because they had a lot to do with human nature. (IT)
Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you’re trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like ‘What is my purpose in life?’ very quickly lacked both. (IT)
Cohen’s father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero’s creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle.
Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime’s experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse. (IT)
He stood up and stretched in the sunshine.
‘It’s a lovely morning, lads,’ he said. ‘I feel like a million dollars. Don’t you?’
There was a murmur of reluctant agreement.
‘Good,’ said Cohen. ‘Let’s go and get some.’ (IT)
'I always live in interestin' times,' said Cohen, in the satisfied voice of someone who did a lot to keep them interesting. (IT)
But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money – sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything – but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn’t sleep. (IT)
‘Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.’ (IT)
[The Luggage] had spent many years trailing through strange lands, meeting exotic creatures and jumping up and down on them. (IT)
‘You see, once you’ve got them at your mercy, you’re not allowed to kill them.’
The Silver Horde, to a man, stared at the ex-teacher.
‘I’m afraid that’s civilization for you,’ he added. (IT)
Freedom did, of course, include man's age-old right to starve to death. (IT)
They never worried about what other people thought. Mr Saveloy, who’d spent his whole life worrying about what other people thought and had been passed over for promotion and generally treated as a piece of furniture as a result, found this strangely attractive. And they never agonized about anything, or wondered if they were doing the right thing. And they enjoyed themselves immensely. They had a kind of honour. He liked the Horde. They weren’t his kind of people. (IT)
The world had too many heroes and didn’t need another one. Whereas the world had only one Rincewind and he owed it to the world to keep this one alive for as long as possible. (IT)
‘Et a man once,’ mumbled Mad Hamish. ‘In a siege, it were.’
‘You ate someone?’ said Mr. Saveloy, beckoning to the waiter.
‘Just a leg.’
‘That’s terrible!’
‘Not with mustard.’ (IT)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, he thought. He was vaguely aware that there was a second half to the saying, but he’d never bothered because the first half always occupied all his attention. (IT)
Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: ‘Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.’ (IT)
No, of course, Twoflower never wanted to cause any trouble. Some people never did. Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying ‘What happens if I do this?’ (IT)
‘I’ll always remember the taste of Mr. Dibbler’s sausages.’
‘People do.’
‘A once-in-a-lifetime experience.’
‘Frequently.’ (IT)
‘I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It’s never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting “Forward, brave comrades!” you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!’ (IT)
‘But there are causes worth dying for,’ said Butterfly.
‘No, there aren’t! Because you’ve only got one life but you can pick up another five causes on any street corner!’
‘Good grief, how can you live with a philosophy like that?’
Rincewind took a deep breath.
‘Continuously!’ (IT)
‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Saveloy. ‘They’ve had a lifetime’s experience of not dying. They’ve become very good at it.’ (IT)
It was something about Cohen. Maybe it was what they called charisma. It overpowered even his normal smell of a goat that had just eaten curried asparagus. (IT)
The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open. (IT)
Rincewind had always assumed that the purpose of running away was to be able to run away another day. (IT)
...behind him someone screamed Rincewind’s nickname, which was: ‘Don’t let him get away!’ (IT)
A wizard would sooner go without his robe and trousers than forgo his hat. Without his hat, people might think he was an ordinary person. (IT)
‘Why don’t we just invite them to dinner and massacre them all when they’re drunk?’
‘You heard the man. There’s seven hundred thousand of them.’
‘Ah? So it’d have to be something simple with pasta, then.’ (IT)
‘Down in Klatch they believe if you lead a good life you’re rewarded by being sent to a paradise with lots of young women.’
‘That’s your reward, is it?’
‘Dunno. Maybe it’s their punishment.’ (IT)
‘Do teachers go anywhere special when they die?’ said Cohen.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mr Saveloy gloomily. He wondered for a moment whether there really was a great Free Period in the sky. It didn’t sound very likely. Probably there would be some marking to do. (IT)
'... I really don't know where teachers go when they're dead, but I've got a horrible suspicion it'll be full of sports masters.' (IT)
'Have you lost your senses?'
'Yes,' said the teacher, 'but I may have found some better ones.' (IT)
‘When seven men go out to fight an army 100,000 times bigger there’s only one way it can end,’ said Twoflower.
‘Right. I’m glad you see sense.’
‘They’ll win,’ said Twoflower. ‘They’ve got to. Otherwise the world’s just not working properly.’ (IT)
He wasn't certain what unisex was but expected that it was what he normally experienced. (IT)
'What do you think this is homeopathic warfare? The smaller your side the more likely you are to win?' (IT)
The time to start running was around about the 'e' in 'Hey you!' (IT)
‘I’m not dependable. Even I don’t depend on me, and I’m me.’ (IT)
‘There’s a lot of waiting in warfare,’ said Boy Willie.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Saveloy. ‘I’ve heard people say that. They say there’s long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement.’
‘Not really,’ said Cohen. ‘It’s more like short periods of waiting followed by long periods of being dead.’ (IT)
There were a large number of ranks in the armies of the Empire and many of them were untranslatable. Three Pink Pig and Five White Fang were, loosely speaking, privates, and not just because they were pale, vulnerable and inclined to curl up and hide when danger threatened. (IT)
... Rincewind had always considered that life was no more than a series of temporary measures strung together. (IT)
Many an ancient lord’s last words had been, ‘You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.’ (IT)
... meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you give it a twist. (IT)
Life was, he had heard, like a bird which flies out of the darkness and across a crowded hall and then through another window into the endless night again. In Rincewind’s case it had managed to do something incontinent in his dinner. (IT)
‘I never sacrifice a pawn,’ said the Lady.
‘How can you hope to win without sacrificing the occasional pawn?’
‘Oh, I never play to win.’ She smiled. ‘But I do play not to lose.’ (IT)
When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events – the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there – that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous. (IT)
‘I didn’t know they were noble,’ said Io.
‘They’re all very rich and have had millions of people butchered or tortured to death merely for reasons of expediency and pride,’ said the Lady.
The watching gods nodded solemnly. That was certainly noble behaviour. That was exactly what they would have done. (IT)
According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organised. (IT)
This is the butterfly of the storms.
See the wings, slightly more ragged than those of the common fritillary. In reality, thanks to the fractal nature of the universe, this means that those ragged edges are infinite – in the same way that the edge of any rugged coastline, when measured to the ultimate microscopic level, is infinitely long – or, if not infinite, then at least so close to it that Infinity can be seen on a clear day.
And therefore, if their edges are infinitely long, the wings must logically be infinitely big.
They may look the right size for a butterfly’s wings, but that’s only because human beings have always preferred common sense to logic. (IT)
Lord Vetinari was sitting in the palace gardens watching the butterflies with an expression of mild annoyance. He found something very slightly offensive about the way they just fluttered around enjoying themselves in an unprofitable way. (IT)
Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.
The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no-one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no-one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Woolly Thinking – which is like Fuzzy Logic, only less so) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too. (IT)
…education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason. (IT)
‘Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to. (IT)
‘Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn’t add to the status of the University to have an ape on the faculty?’
‘Yes,’ said Ridcully flatly. ‘You are. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.’ (IT)
‘Oh no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things we don’t understand.’
‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.’ (IT)
The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity some time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was often quite coherent, although not by normal human standards. (IT)
‘Besides…where Rincewind went’ – he lowered his voice – ‘trouble followed behind.’
Ridcully noticed that the wizards drew a little closer together.
‘Sounds all right to me,’ he said. ‘Best place for trouble, behind. You certainly don’t want it in front.’ (IT)
It was possible, if you kept on talking at the Archchancellor long enough, that some facts might squeeze through. (IT)
‘You’re all missin’ the point. He survives. You keep on tellin’ me he’s had all these adventures and he’s still alive.’
‘What do you mean? He’s got scars all over him!’
‘My point exactly, Dean. Most of ‘em on his back, too. He leaves trouble behind. Someone Up There smiles on him.’
Rincewind winced. He had always been aware that Someone Up There was doing something on him. He’d never considered it was smiling. (IT)
'I hate it when people are nice to me. It means something bad is going to happen.' (IT)
... he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where toe good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. (IT)
Ridcully assumed that anything people had time to write down couldn’t be important. (IT)
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. (IT)
‘How will I get back?’ he said.
‘Same way you went. We’ll find you and bring you out. With surgical precision.’
Rincewind groaned. He knew what surgical precision meant in Ankh-Morpork. It meant ‘to within an inch or two, accompanied by a lot of screaming, and then they pour hot tar on you just where your leg was.’ (IT)
But…if you put aside for the moment the certainty that something would definitely go horribly wrong, it looked foolproof. The trouble was that wizards were such ingenious fools. (IT)
Assassination was meat and drink to the Hunghung court; in fact, meat and drink were often the means. (IT)
‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Rincewind. ‘No problem there. I’m good at that.’ (IT)
He was no good at anything else. Wizardry was the only refuge. Well, actually he was no good at wizardry either, but at least he was definitively no good at it. He’d always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn’t do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn’t a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid. (IT)
And he probably had saved the world a few times, but it had generally happened accidentally, while he was trying to do something else. So you almost certainly didn’t actually get any karmic points for that. It probably only counted if you started out by thinking in a loud way ‘By criminy, it’s jolly well time to save the world, and no two ways about it!’ instead of ‘Oh shit, this time I’m really going to die.’ (IT)
There was something about Cohen. People caught optimism off him as though it was the common cold. (IT)
‘… I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.’
‘After being a teacher all your life?’
‘It did mean a change of perspective, yes.’
‘But...well…surely…the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death…’
Mr Saveloy brightened up. ‘Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?’ (IT)
A foot on the neck is nine points of the law. (IT)
‘Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.’ (IT)
Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, “Turn over your papers now.” (IT)
…in Rincewind’s experience there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a scream and a good ten yards’ start. (IT)
Rincewind was not politically minded but there were some things he could work out not because they were to do with politics but because they had a lot to do with human nature. (IT)
Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you’re trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like ‘What is my purpose in life?’ very quickly lacked both. (IT)
Cohen’s father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero’s creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle.
Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime’s experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse. (IT)
He stood up and stretched in the sunshine.
‘It’s a lovely morning, lads,’ he said. ‘I feel like a million dollars. Don’t you?’
There was a murmur of reluctant agreement.
‘Good,’ said Cohen. ‘Let’s go and get some.’ (IT)
'I always live in interestin' times,' said Cohen, in the satisfied voice of someone who did a lot to keep them interesting. (IT)
But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money – sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything – but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn’t sleep. (IT)
‘Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.’ (IT)
[The Luggage] had spent many years trailing through strange lands, meeting exotic creatures and jumping up and down on them. (IT)
‘You see, once you’ve got them at your mercy, you’re not allowed to kill them.’
The Silver Horde, to a man, stared at the ex-teacher.
‘I’m afraid that’s civilization for you,’ he added. (IT)
Freedom did, of course, include man's age-old right to starve to death. (IT)
They never worried about what other people thought. Mr Saveloy, who’d spent his whole life worrying about what other people thought and had been passed over for promotion and generally treated as a piece of furniture as a result, found this strangely attractive. And they never agonized about anything, or wondered if they were doing the right thing. And they enjoyed themselves immensely. They had a kind of honour. He liked the Horde. They weren’t his kind of people. (IT)
The world had too many heroes and didn’t need another one. Whereas the world had only one Rincewind and he owed it to the world to keep this one alive for as long as possible. (IT)
‘Et a man once,’ mumbled Mad Hamish. ‘In a siege, it were.’
‘You ate someone?’ said Mr. Saveloy, beckoning to the waiter.
‘Just a leg.’
‘That’s terrible!’
‘Not with mustard.’ (IT)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, he thought. He was vaguely aware that there was a second half to the saying, but he’d never bothered because the first half always occupied all his attention. (IT)
Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: ‘Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.’ (IT)
No, of course, Twoflower never wanted to cause any trouble. Some people never did. Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying ‘What happens if I do this?’ (IT)
‘I’ll always remember the taste of Mr. Dibbler’s sausages.’
‘People do.’
‘A once-in-a-lifetime experience.’
‘Frequently.’ (IT)
‘I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It’s never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting “Forward, brave comrades!” you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!’ (IT)
‘But there are causes worth dying for,’ said Butterfly.
‘No, there aren’t! Because you’ve only got one life but you can pick up another five causes on any street corner!’
‘Good grief, how can you live with a philosophy like that?’
Rincewind took a deep breath.
‘Continuously!’ (IT)
‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Saveloy. ‘They’ve had a lifetime’s experience of not dying. They’ve become very good at it.’ (IT)
It was something about Cohen. Maybe it was what they called charisma. It overpowered even his normal smell of a goat that had just eaten curried asparagus. (IT)
The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open. (IT)
Rincewind had always assumed that the purpose of running away was to be able to run away another day. (IT)
...behind him someone screamed Rincewind’s nickname, which was: ‘Don’t let him get away!’ (IT)
A wizard would sooner go without his robe and trousers than forgo his hat. Without his hat, people might think he was an ordinary person. (IT)
‘Why don’t we just invite them to dinner and massacre them all when they’re drunk?’
‘You heard the man. There’s seven hundred thousand of them.’
‘Ah? So it’d have to be something simple with pasta, then.’ (IT)
‘Down in Klatch they believe if you lead a good life you’re rewarded by being sent to a paradise with lots of young women.’
‘That’s your reward, is it?’
‘Dunno. Maybe it’s their punishment.’ (IT)
‘Do teachers go anywhere special when they die?’ said Cohen.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mr Saveloy gloomily. He wondered for a moment whether there really was a great Free Period in the sky. It didn’t sound very likely. Probably there would be some marking to do. (IT)
'... I really don't know where teachers go when they're dead, but I've got a horrible suspicion it'll be full of sports masters.' (IT)
'Have you lost your senses?'
'Yes,' said the teacher, 'but I may have found some better ones.' (IT)
‘When seven men go out to fight an army 100,000 times bigger there’s only one way it can end,’ said Twoflower.
‘Right. I’m glad you see sense.’
‘They’ll win,’ said Twoflower. ‘They’ve got to. Otherwise the world’s just not working properly.’ (IT)
He wasn't certain what unisex was but expected that it was what he normally experienced. (IT)
'What do you think this is homeopathic warfare? The smaller your side the more likely you are to win?' (IT)
The time to start running was around about the 'e' in 'Hey you!' (IT)
‘I’m not dependable. Even I don’t depend on me, and I’m me.’ (IT)
‘There’s a lot of waiting in warfare,’ said Boy Willie.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Saveloy. ‘I’ve heard people say that. They say there’s long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement.’
‘Not really,’ said Cohen. ‘It’s more like short periods of waiting followed by long periods of being dead.’ (IT)
There were a large number of ranks in the armies of the Empire and many of them were untranslatable. Three Pink Pig and Five White Fang were, loosely speaking, privates, and not just because they were pale, vulnerable and inclined to curl up and hide when danger threatened. (IT)
... Rincewind had always considered that life was no more than a series of temporary measures strung together. (IT)
Many an ancient lord’s last words had been, ‘You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.’ (IT)
... meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you give it a twist. (IT)
Life was, he had heard, like a bird which flies out of the darkness and across a crowded hall and then through another window into the endless night again. In Rincewind’s case it had managed to do something incontinent in his dinner. (IT)
‘I never sacrifice a pawn,’ said the Lady.
‘How can you hope to win without sacrificing the occasional pawn?’
‘Oh, I never play to win.’ She smiled. ‘But I do play not to lose.’ (IT)
