Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist. (MP)
There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.
At least there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way. (MP)
…Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was ‘Winged you, yer bastard!’ (MP)
By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold. (MP)
There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was not run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men. (MP)
‘I went into the Uncommon Room this morning, and it was full of chaps snoring!’
‘That would be the senior masters, Master,’ said the Bursar. ‘I would say they are supremely fit, myself.’
‘Fit? The Dean looks like a man who’s swallered a bed!’
‘Ah, but Master,’ said the Bursar smiling indulgently, ‘the word ‘fit’, as I understand it, means ‘appropriate to a purpose,’ and I would say the body of the Dean is supremely appropriate to the purpose of sitting around all day and eating big heavy meals.’ (MP)
‘A few twenty-mile runs and the Dean’d be a different man.’
‘Well, yes,’ said the Bursar. ‘He’d be dead.’ (MP)
‘Students?’ barked the Archchancellor.
‘Yes, Master. You know? They’re the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we’re a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats-’ (MP)
… Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world.
Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor has passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour (MP)
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. (MP)
Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. (MP)
It was the special sort of beautiful area which is only beautiful if you can leave after briefly admiring its beauty and go somewhere else where there are hot tubs and cold drinks. Actually staying there for any length of time is a penance. (MP)
It was widely believed that, if Detritus could be taught to read and write sufficiently to sit down and do an intelligence test, he’d prove to be slightly less intelligent than the chair. (MP)
‘I don’t know if I’d be any good at acting, though,’ Victor confessed.
Silverfish looked surprised. ‘Oh, you’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures.’ (MP)
… Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end. (MP)
Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of people to buy what he had to sell. (MP)
“ … a man who could sell Mr Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything”, said Victor. (MP)
The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die. (MP)
“… when you sell sausages you don’t just hang around waiting for people to want sausage, you go out there and make them hungry. And you put mustard on ‘em.” (MP)
When Mrs Whitlow was in the grip of acute class consciousness she could create aitches where nature never intended them to be. (MP)
Throat took a deep breath of the thick city air. Real air. You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air. You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years. (MP)
The people of Ankh-Morpork liked novelty. The trouble was that they didn’t like novelty for long. (MP)
‘It’s stew. Take it or leave it. Three customers this morning have done both.’ (MP)
Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people. (MP)
‘Ah, ‘tis a hard trade, horse-holding,’ said the man. ‘It’s learning the proper grovellin’ and the irreverent-but-not-too-impudent cheery ‘oss-’older’s banter. People don’t just want you to look after the ‘oss, see. They want a ‘oss-’olding hexperience.’
‘They do?’
‘They want an amusin’ encounter and a soup-son of repartee,’ said the little man. ‘It’s not just a matter of ‘oldin’ reins.’
Realization began to dawn on Victor.
‘It’s a performance,’ he said. (MP)
‘Make him a star? What’d he want a star for?’ ‘I didn’t know you could make stars…I thought they were like, you know, stuck to the sky…’
‘I think he meant make him a star. You know, him himself. Turn him into a star.’
‘How can you make anyone into a star?’
‘I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?’ (MP)
It wasn’t that he’d been talking to a dog. People often talked to dogs. The same applied to the cat. And maybe even the rabbit. It was the conversation with the mouse and the duck that might be considered odd. (MP)
‘I’m a cat person, myself,’ she said, vaguely.
A low-level voice said: ‘Yeah? Yeah? Wash in your own spit, do you?’ (MP)
He gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. Gaspode could outstare a mirror. (MP)
Over Holy Wood the stars were out. They were huge balls of hydrogen heated to millions of degrees, so hot they could not even burn. Many of them would swell enormously before they died, and then shrink to tiny, resentful dwarfs remembered only by sentimental astronomers. In the meantime, they glowed because of metamorphoses beyond the reach of alchemists, and turned mere boring elements into pure light. (MP)
‘It’s got him,’ said Gaspode quietly. ‘Got him worse than anyone, I reckon.’
‘What has? How can you tell?’ Victor hissed.
‘Partly a’cos of subtle signs what you don’t seem to be abler recognise,’ said Gaspode, ‘and partly because he’s actin’ like a complete twerp, really.’ (MP)
‘What’re you supposed to be?’ he said at last.
‘A leader of a pack of desert bandits, apparently,’ said Victor. ‘Romantic and dashing.’
‘Dashing where?’
‘Just dashing generally, I guess.’ (MP)
Camels are far too intelligent to admit to being intelligent. (MP)
‘Er, I was just wondering, Mr. Dibbler ... what is my motivation for this scene?’
‘Motivation?’
‘Yes. Er, I got to know, see,’ said Rock.
‘How about: I’ll fire you if you don’t do it properly?’
Rock grinned. ‘Right you are, Mr. Dibbler,’ he said. (MP)
‘The trouble is, I can explain it in Dog, but you only listen in Human.’ (MP)
A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. (MP)
‘They’re pretty high mountains,’ said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.
‘Slopes go up, slopes go down,’ said M’bu gnomically.
‘That’s true,’ said Azhural. ‘Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.’ (MP)
‘Everyone marries their cousins where I come from.’
‘Why?’ said Victor.
‘I suppose it saves having to worry about what to do on Saturday nights.’ (MP)
‘Ah’, said Victor, trying to keep up with the psychology of this. ‘You decided you wanted to be someone?’
‘Don’t be silly. That’s when I decided I was going to be a lot more than just someone.’ (MP)
‘You know what the greatest tragedy in the whole world is?’ said Ginger, not paying him the least attention. ‘It’s all the people who never find out what they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become ploughmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out.’
She took a deep breath. ‘It’s all the people who never get to know what it is they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances.’ (MP)
‘The man was mad!’
‘He had a very tidy mind,’ said the Bursar.
‘Same thing.’ (MP)
‘That’s what intelligence does for your sex life,’ said Don’t-call-me-Mr-Thumpy. ‘Rabbits never have that sort of trouble. Go, Sow, Thank You Doe.’ (MP)
All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing. Their courtships are largely concerned with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is. (MP)
‘Pedigree? Pedigree? What’s a pedigree? It’s just breedin’. I had a father too, you know. And two grandads. And four great-grandads. And many of ‘em were the same dog, even.’ (MP)
‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You think Dopey the Mutt there would last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork? He set one paw in some o’ the streets, he’s three sets of fur gloves an’ Crispy Fried No. 27 at the nearest Klatchian all-night carry-out.’ (MP)
Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.
At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff. (MP)
And then suddenly someone somewhere wanted a thousand elephants, and the lad had raised his head and a gleam had come into his eye and you could see that under that grin was a skilled kilopachydermatolist ready to answer the call. Funny. You could know someone for their whole life and not realize that the gods had put them in this world to move a thousand elephants around the place. (MP)
‘Fate doesn’t like it when people take up more space than they ought to.’ (MP)
Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it. (MP)
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.
All over the entire room, sometimes. (MP)
Not ambition for gold, or power, or land or all the things that were familiar parts of the human world. Just ambition to be yourself, as big as possible. Not ambition for, but to be. (MP)
You just get one chance, she said. You live for maybe seventy years, and if you’re lucky you get one chance. Think of all the natural skiers who are born in deserts. Think of all the genius blacksmiths who were born hundreds of years before anyone invented the horse. All the skills that are never used. All the wasted chances. (MP)
The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realisation that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you. (MP)
‘There was sunnink I got to tell you. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I remember. Your girlfriend is an agent of demonic powers.’ (MP)
‘…people who like cats’re capable of anythin’, you can’t trust ‘em …’ (MP)
‘I mean, Holy Wood is a different sort of place, isn’t it? People act differently here. Everywhere else, the most important things are gods or money or cattle. Here, the most important thing is to be important.’ (MP)
According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles. (MP)
‘You’re my own flesh and blood,’ said Dibbler, shaking his head. ‘How can you do this to me?’
‘Because I’m your own flesh and blood,’ said Soll.
Dibbler brightened. Of course, when you looked at it like that, it didn’t seem so bad. (MP)
The darkness flowed back. Victor had never known darkness like it. No matter how long you looked into it your eyes wouldn’t grow accustomed to it. There was nothing to become accustomed to. It was darkness and mother of darkness, darkness absolute, the darkness under the earth, darkness so dense to be almost tangible, like cold velvet. (MP)
The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out yourself from the clues.
And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house. (MP)
Victor remembered being frightened of tigers when he was young. In vain did people point out that the nearest tiger was three thousand miles away. He’d say, ‘Is there any sea between where they live and here?’ and people would say, ‘Well, no, but -’ and he’d say ‘Then it’s just a matter of distance.’ (MP)
‘You don’t think you’ve had enough, do you?’ he said.
I KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH.
‘Everyone says that, though.’
I KNOW WHEN EVERYONE’S HAD ENOUGH. (MP)
‘I was saying,’ he said loudly, ‘that we didn’t know the meaning of the word “sex” when we were young.’
‘That’s true. That’s very true,’ said Poons. He stared reflectively at the flames. ‘Did we ever, mm, find out, do you remember?’ (MP)
…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. (MP)
He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him. (MP)
The University sanitarium wasn’t very big, and was seldom used. Wizards tended to be either in rude health, or dead. The only medicine they generally required was an antacid formula and a dark room until lunch. (MP)
Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves, and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all. (MP)
‘Whatever happened to integrity round here?’
‘I think you probably sold it to someone, Uncle.’ (MP)
‘It looks worse than you can imagine!’
‘I can imagine some pretty bad things!’
‘That’s why I said worse!’ (MP)
‘Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?’ said Dibbler.
‘He says he can’t,’ said Victor.
Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose he should know.’ (MP)
Nothing created by Holy Wood magic was real for long.
But you could make it real for long enough. (MP)
‘‘Twas beauty killed the beast’, said the Dean, who liked to say things like that.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said the Chair. ‘It was it splatting into the ground like that.’ (MP)
If heroes didn’t arrive in the nick of time, where was the sense in anything? (MP)
‘Why us?’ he said. ‘Why is it happening to us?’
‘Everything has to happen to someone,’ said Ginger. (MP)
If Ruby had learned anything in Holy Wood, it was that there was no use in waiting around for Mr Right to hit you with a brick. You had to make your own bricks. (MP)
‘What can you be, after you’ve been yourself, as big as possible?’ (MP)
THERE’S JUST ME, said Death. THE FINAL FRONTIER. (MP)
There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.
At least there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way. (MP)
…Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was ‘Winged you, yer bastard!’ (MP)
By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold. (MP)
There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was not run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men. (MP)
‘I went into the Uncommon Room this morning, and it was full of chaps snoring!’
‘That would be the senior masters, Master,’ said the Bursar. ‘I would say they are supremely fit, myself.’
‘Fit? The Dean looks like a man who’s swallered a bed!’
‘Ah, but Master,’ said the Bursar smiling indulgently, ‘the word ‘fit’, as I understand it, means ‘appropriate to a purpose,’ and I would say the body of the Dean is supremely appropriate to the purpose of sitting around all day and eating big heavy meals.’ (MP)
‘A few twenty-mile runs and the Dean’d be a different man.’
‘Well, yes,’ said the Bursar. ‘He’d be dead.’ (MP)
‘Students?’ barked the Archchancellor.
‘Yes, Master. You know? They’re the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we’re a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats-’ (MP)
… Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world.
Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor has passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour (MP)
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. (MP)
Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. (MP)
It was the special sort of beautiful area which is only beautiful if you can leave after briefly admiring its beauty and go somewhere else where there are hot tubs and cold drinks. Actually staying there for any length of time is a penance. (MP)
It was widely believed that, if Detritus could be taught to read and write sufficiently to sit down and do an intelligence test, he’d prove to be slightly less intelligent than the chair. (MP)
‘I don’t know if I’d be any good at acting, though,’ Victor confessed.
Silverfish looked surprised. ‘Oh, you’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures.’ (MP)
… Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end. (MP)
Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of people to buy what he had to sell. (MP)
“ … a man who could sell Mr Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything”, said Victor. (MP)
The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die. (MP)
“… when you sell sausages you don’t just hang around waiting for people to want sausage, you go out there and make them hungry. And you put mustard on ‘em.” (MP)
When Mrs Whitlow was in the grip of acute class consciousness she could create aitches where nature never intended them to be. (MP)
Throat took a deep breath of the thick city air. Real air. You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air. You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years. (MP)
The people of Ankh-Morpork liked novelty. The trouble was that they didn’t like novelty for long. (MP)
‘It’s stew. Take it or leave it. Three customers this morning have done both.’ (MP)
Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people. (MP)
‘Ah, ‘tis a hard trade, horse-holding,’ said the man. ‘It’s learning the proper grovellin’ and the irreverent-but-not-too-impudent cheery ‘oss-’older’s banter. People don’t just want you to look after the ‘oss, see. They want a ‘oss-’olding hexperience.’
‘They do?’
‘They want an amusin’ encounter and a soup-son of repartee,’ said the little man. ‘It’s not just a matter of ‘oldin’ reins.’
Realization began to dawn on Victor.
‘It’s a performance,’ he said. (MP)
‘Make him a star? What’d he want a star for?’ ‘I didn’t know you could make stars…I thought they were like, you know, stuck to the sky…’
‘I think he meant make him a star. You know, him himself. Turn him into a star.’
‘How can you make anyone into a star?’
‘I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?’ (MP)
It wasn’t that he’d been talking to a dog. People often talked to dogs. The same applied to the cat. And maybe even the rabbit. It was the conversation with the mouse and the duck that might be considered odd. (MP)
‘I’m a cat person, myself,’ she said, vaguely.
A low-level voice said: ‘Yeah? Yeah? Wash in your own spit, do you?’ (MP)
He gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. Gaspode could outstare a mirror. (MP)
Over Holy Wood the stars were out. They were huge balls of hydrogen heated to millions of degrees, so hot they could not even burn. Many of them would swell enormously before they died, and then shrink to tiny, resentful dwarfs remembered only by sentimental astronomers. In the meantime, they glowed because of metamorphoses beyond the reach of alchemists, and turned mere boring elements into pure light. (MP)
‘It’s got him,’ said Gaspode quietly. ‘Got him worse than anyone, I reckon.’
‘What has? How can you tell?’ Victor hissed.
‘Partly a’cos of subtle signs what you don’t seem to be abler recognise,’ said Gaspode, ‘and partly because he’s actin’ like a complete twerp, really.’ (MP)
‘What’re you supposed to be?’ he said at last.
‘A leader of a pack of desert bandits, apparently,’ said Victor. ‘Romantic and dashing.’
‘Dashing where?’
‘Just dashing generally, I guess.’ (MP)
Camels are far too intelligent to admit to being intelligent. (MP)
‘Er, I was just wondering, Mr. Dibbler ... what is my motivation for this scene?’
‘Motivation?’
‘Yes. Er, I got to know, see,’ said Rock.
‘How about: I’ll fire you if you don’t do it properly?’
Rock grinned. ‘Right you are, Mr. Dibbler,’ he said. (MP)
‘The trouble is, I can explain it in Dog, but you only listen in Human.’ (MP)
A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. (MP)
‘They’re pretty high mountains,’ said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.
‘Slopes go up, slopes go down,’ said M’bu gnomically.
‘That’s true,’ said Azhural. ‘Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.’ (MP)
‘Everyone marries their cousins where I come from.’
‘Why?’ said Victor.
‘I suppose it saves having to worry about what to do on Saturday nights.’ (MP)
‘Ah’, said Victor, trying to keep up with the psychology of this. ‘You decided you wanted to be someone?’
‘Don’t be silly. That’s when I decided I was going to be a lot more than just someone.’ (MP)
‘You know what the greatest tragedy in the whole world is?’ said Ginger, not paying him the least attention. ‘It’s all the people who never find out what they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become ploughmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out.’
She took a deep breath. ‘It’s all the people who never get to know what it is they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances.’ (MP)
‘The man was mad!’
‘He had a very tidy mind,’ said the Bursar.
‘Same thing.’ (MP)
‘That’s what intelligence does for your sex life,’ said Don’t-call-me-Mr-Thumpy. ‘Rabbits never have that sort of trouble. Go, Sow, Thank You Doe.’ (MP)
All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing. Their courtships are largely concerned with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is. (MP)
‘Pedigree? Pedigree? What’s a pedigree? It’s just breedin’. I had a father too, you know. And two grandads. And four great-grandads. And many of ‘em were the same dog, even.’ (MP)
‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You think Dopey the Mutt there would last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork? He set one paw in some o’ the streets, he’s three sets of fur gloves an’ Crispy Fried No. 27 at the nearest Klatchian all-night carry-out.’ (MP)
Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.
At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff. (MP)
And then suddenly someone somewhere wanted a thousand elephants, and the lad had raised his head and a gleam had come into his eye and you could see that under that grin was a skilled kilopachydermatolist ready to answer the call. Funny. You could know someone for their whole life and not realize that the gods had put them in this world to move a thousand elephants around the place. (MP)
‘Fate doesn’t like it when people take up more space than they ought to.’ (MP)
Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it. (MP)
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.
All over the entire room, sometimes. (MP)
Not ambition for gold, or power, or land or all the things that were familiar parts of the human world. Just ambition to be yourself, as big as possible. Not ambition for, but to be. (MP)
You just get one chance, she said. You live for maybe seventy years, and if you’re lucky you get one chance. Think of all the natural skiers who are born in deserts. Think of all the genius blacksmiths who were born hundreds of years before anyone invented the horse. All the skills that are never used. All the wasted chances. (MP)
The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realisation that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you. (MP)
‘There was sunnink I got to tell you. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I remember. Your girlfriend is an agent of demonic powers.’ (MP)
‘…people who like cats’re capable of anythin’, you can’t trust ‘em …’ (MP)
‘I mean, Holy Wood is a different sort of place, isn’t it? People act differently here. Everywhere else, the most important things are gods or money or cattle. Here, the most important thing is to be important.’ (MP)
According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles. (MP)
‘You’re my own flesh and blood,’ said Dibbler, shaking his head. ‘How can you do this to me?’
‘Because I’m your own flesh and blood,’ said Soll.
Dibbler brightened. Of course, when you looked at it like that, it didn’t seem so bad. (MP)
The darkness flowed back. Victor had never known darkness like it. No matter how long you looked into it your eyes wouldn’t grow accustomed to it. There was nothing to become accustomed to. It was darkness and mother of darkness, darkness absolute, the darkness under the earth, darkness so dense to be almost tangible, like cold velvet. (MP)
The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out yourself from the clues.
And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house. (MP)
Victor remembered being frightened of tigers when he was young. In vain did people point out that the nearest tiger was three thousand miles away. He’d say, ‘Is there any sea between where they live and here?’ and people would say, ‘Well, no, but -’ and he’d say ‘Then it’s just a matter of distance.’ (MP)
‘You don’t think you’ve had enough, do you?’ he said.
I KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH.
‘Everyone says that, though.’
I KNOW WHEN EVERYONE’S HAD ENOUGH. (MP)
‘I was saying,’ he said loudly, ‘that we didn’t know the meaning of the word “sex” when we were young.’
‘That’s true. That’s very true,’ said Poons. He stared reflectively at the flames. ‘Did we ever, mm, find out, do you remember?’ (MP)
…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. (MP)
He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him. (MP)
The University sanitarium wasn’t very big, and was seldom used. Wizards tended to be either in rude health, or dead. The only medicine they generally required was an antacid formula and a dark room until lunch. (MP)
Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves, and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all. (MP)
‘Whatever happened to integrity round here?’
‘I think you probably sold it to someone, Uncle.’ (MP)
‘It looks worse than you can imagine!’
‘I can imagine some pretty bad things!’
‘That’s why I said worse!’ (MP)
‘Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?’ said Dibbler.
‘He says he can’t,’ said Victor.
Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose he should know.’ (MP)
Nothing created by Holy Wood magic was real for long.
But you could make it real for long enough. (MP)
‘‘Twas beauty killed the beast’, said the Dean, who liked to say things like that.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said the Chair. ‘It was it splatting into the ground like that.’ (MP)
If heroes didn’t arrive in the nick of time, where was the sense in anything? (MP)
‘Why us?’ he said. ‘Why is it happening to us?’
‘Everything has to happen to someone,’ said Ginger. (MP)
If Ruby had learned anything in Holy Wood, it was that there was no use in waiting around for Mr Right to hit you with a brick. You had to make your own bricks. (MP)
‘What can you be, after you’ve been yourself, as big as possible?’ (MP)
THERE’S JUST ME, said Death. THE FINAL FRONTIER. (MP)
