Quotes from Rincewind
Picturesque meant – he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word – that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant ‘idiot’. (COM)
'That’s what’s so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you’re so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can’t remember what happens next.' (COM)
‘… if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet armour and shouting “All gods are bastards’. (COM)
Rincewind opened his mouth to reply but felt the words huddle together in his throat, reluctant to emerge into a world that was rapidly going mad. (COM)
‘I assure you the thought never crossed my mind, lord.’
‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander’. (COM)
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic and utterly humourless rictus. It was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out, picking scraps out of the teeth. (COM)
'You mean they hate water?' said Twoflower.
‘No, that wouldn’t work,’ said Rincewind. ‘Hate is an attracting force,
just like love. They really loathe it, the very idea of it revolts them.' (COM)
'You’re a defeatist.’
‘Defeatist! That’s because I’m going to be defeated.’
‘You’re your own worst enemy, Rincewind,’ said the sword.
Rincewind looked up at the grinning men.
‘Bet?’ he said wearily. (COM)
I can’t be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I’d be mad, and I’m not made, so trees can’t talk. (LF)
Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.
On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away. (LF)
Rincewind had generally been reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. (LF)
Rincewind was a city wizard and, although he was aware that there were various differences among types of tree by which their nearest and dearest could tell them apart, the only thing he knew for certain was that the end without leaves on fitted into the ground. (LF)
‘Well, it just reeks ambience.’
‘Oh.’
‘What’s ambience?’ said Swires, sniffing cautiously and wearing the kind of expression that said that he hadn’t done it, whatever it was.
‘I think it’s a kind of frog,’ said Rincewind. (LF)
Owing largely to inefficiency Rincewind had consistently failed to die at the right time, and if there’s one thing that Death does not like it is unpunctuality. (LF)
He believed, against all experience, that the world was fundamentally understandable, and that if he could only equip himself with the right mental toolbox he could take the back off and see how it worked. He was, of course, dead wrong. (LF)
... Rincewind had in any case seen his past life flash in front of his eyes so many times that he could sleep through the boring bits ... (LF)
'They do say if it’s summa cum laude, then the living is easy - ' (LF)
'Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead…' (LF)
'You run away a lot,’ said one of the voices. ‘That is good. You are a survivor.’
‘Survivor? I’ve nearly been killed dozens of times!’
‘Exactly.' (LF)
'What shall we do?’said Twoflower.
‘Panic?’ said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival. (LF)
‘I’m a firm believer in reincarnation. What would you like to come back as?’
‘I don’t want to go,’ said Rincewind firmly. (LF)
Rincewind knew what orgasms were, of course, he’d had a few in his time, sometimes even in company. (LF)
Rincewind opened his eyes and lay for a moment looking up at the stuffed reptile. It was not the best thing to see when awakening from troubled dreams ... (LF)
Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons of Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn’t even notice them. (LF)
That’s old Twoflower. Rincewind thought. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. And treads on it. It’s right what Cohen says. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect. (LF)
… ‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’ (S)
‘Sorry. I don’t know why, but the prospect of certain death in unknown lands at the claws of exotic monsters isn’t for me. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t get the hang of it. Each to their own, that’s what I say, and I was cut out for boredom.’ (S)
‘You’re safe now.’
‘What, you mean I’m all alone with a female homicidal maniac?’ said Rincewind. ‘Fine.’ (S)
He opened his eyes. The girl was wearing a demure white lace dress with fetching puffed sleeves. He opened his mouth. He realised with absolute clarity that up until now the trouble he had been in was simple, modest and nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of given a decent chance or, failing that, a running start. (S)
Rincewind sagged. ‘Why me?’ he moaned.
For the good of the University. For the honour of wizardry. For the sake of the world. For your heart’s desire. And I’ll freeze you alive if you don’t.
Rincewind breathed a sigh almost of relief. He wasn’t good on bribes, or cajolery, or appeals to his better nature. But threats, now, threats were familiar. He knew where he stood with threats. (S)
He wasn’t any good at magic, but he’d had a hundred per cent success at staying alive up to now and didn’t want to spoil the record. All he needed to do was to learn how to swim in the time it took to dive into the sea. It was worth a try. (S)
It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting. (S)
It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind. (S)
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met. (S)
The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do. (S)
'If we get a chance,’ whispered Rincewind to Nijel, ‘we run, right?’
‘Where to?’
‘From,’ said Rincewind, ‘the important word is from.' (S)
'... Death walks abroad,’ said Nijel.
‘Abroad I don’t mind, said Rincewind. '‘They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.' (S)
'Rincewind, I’ve known you for an hour and I’m astonished you’ve lived even that long!’
‘Yes, but I have, haven’t I? I’ve got a sort of talent for it. Ask anyone. I’m an addict.’
‘Addicted to what?’
‘Life. I got hooked on it at an early age and I don’t want to give it up...' (S)
‘I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.’ (S)
'I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet!’ he hissed. ‘I’m afraid of grounds!’
‘You mean heights,’ said Conina. ‘And stop being silly.’
‘I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you.' (S)
‘I’ve often wondered what being poor was like.’
‘You’re going to get a huge opportunity to find out.’
‘Will I need training?’
‘It comes naturally,’ said Rincewind. ‘You pick it up as you go along.’ (S)
Many people who had got to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner’s canary and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained. (S)
'My father always said that death is but a sleep,’ said Conina.
‘Yes, the hat told me that,’ said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls.
‘But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.' (S)
'This is a robe,’ said Rincewind quickly. ‘And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.' (S)
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,’ said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. ‘Been completely at a loss my whole life.’ He hesitated. ‘I think it’s called being human …’ (S)
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)
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)
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)
'What’re quantum mechanics?'
'I don’t know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.' (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)
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)
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)
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)
'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)
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)
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)
'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)
'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)
'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)
'I'll always remember the taste of Mr Dibbler's sausages.'
‘People do.’
‘A once-in-a-lifetime experience.’
‘Frequently.’ (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)
... in Rincewind’s experience there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a scream and a good ten yards’ start. (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)
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)
Rincewind had always assumed that the purpose of running away was to be able to run away another day. (IT)
‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
‘Oh,that,’said Rincewind.‘No problem there. I’m good at that.’ (IT)
'Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.' (IT)
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. (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)
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 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)
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)
'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)
'... behind him someone screamed Rincewind’s nickname, which was: ‘Don’t let him get away!' (IT)
He wasn't certain what unisex was but expected that it was what he normally experienced. (IT)
'When seven men go out to fight an army100,000 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)
... Rincewind had always considered that life was no more than a series of temporary measures strung together. (IT)
He was not going to be found wanting when duty called. He did not intend to be found at all. (LC)
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Metres, the Mile, the Marathon – he’d run them all. (LC)
'Haven’t you ever noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?’
‘Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that too,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.’
‘Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.’
‘Yes, but it’s the important one.' (LC)
Now he remembered, with a shudder, some of the great wheezes he’d had on similar occasions. Spaghetti and custard, that’d been a good one. Deep-fried peas, that’d been another triumph. And then there’d been the time when it had seemed a really good idea to eat some flour and yeast and then drink some warm water, because he’d run out of bread and after all that was what the stomach saw, wasn’t it? The thing about late-night cookery was that it
made sense at the time. It always has some logic behind it. It just wasn’t the kind of logic you’d use around midday. (LC)
A flash of inspiration struck him with all the force and brilliance that ideas have when they’re travelling through beer. (LC)
'I think maybe I’d better make you up the cure for drinking too much beer, mate.’
‘What’s the cure?’
‘More beer.' (LC)
'Got any requests for your last breakfast?’
‘Something that takes a really really long time to prepare?’ said Rincewind. (LC)
'So now we know,’said Archchancellor Rincewind. ‘We’ve got to keep you just drunk enough so that Dibbler's pies sound tasty, but not so drunk that it causes lasting brain damage.’
‘That’s a very narrow range we’ve got there,’ said the Dean. (LC)
‘I’ll have a pint of Chardonnay, please.’
‘You takin’ the piss?’
‘No, I’d like to leave it here-' (LC)
'Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?'
YES
'Ghastly thought, really.’ Rincewind shuddered. ‘Oh, gods, I’ve just had another one. Suppose I am just about to die and this is my whole life passing in front of my eyes?’
I THINK PERHAPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. PEOPLE’S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED ‘LIVING’. (LC)
'Want to stay on here? I had a word with your Dean. He gave you a bloody good reference.’
‘Did he? What did he say?’
‘He said if I could get you to do any work for me I’d be lucky’, said Bill. (LC)
Oh, I never stop to find out why people are chasing me, sir. I never look behind either. That'd be rather silly, sir.' (LH)
'Are you a friend of his?'
'Well, we've met a couple of times and he didn't kill me,' said Rincewind. 'That probably counts as a a "yes".' (LH)
'I've been living my life for a long time. I know how it works.' (LH)
'It’s very simple. I’m volunteering. I just don’t wish to. But, after all, when did that ever have anything to do with anything?' (LH)
'It will certainly be a challenge to go where no one has gone before,’ said Carrot.
‘Wrong! We’re going where no one has come back from before.' (LH)
Rincewind stared at the badge. He’d never had one before. Well, that was technically a lie ... he’d had one that said ‘Hello, I Am 5 Today!’, which was just about the worst possible present to get when you are six. (LH)
'What is that on your badge, Captain Carrot?'
‘Mission motto, sir,’ said Carrot cheerfully. ‘Morituri Nolumus Mori. Rincewind suggested it.’
‘I imagine he did,’ said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly. ‘And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind?’
‘Er…’ Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape. ‘Er…roughly speaking, it means, “We who are about to die don’t want to”, sir.’ (LH)
As one man, they turned in their seats to look at the Experimental Privy Mk 2. Mk 1 had worked – Leonard’s devices tended to– but since the key to its operation was that it tumbled very fast on a central axis while in use it had been abandoned after a report by its test pilot (Rincewind) that, whatever you had in mind when you went in, the only thing you wanted to do once inside was get out.
Mk 2 was as yet untried. It creaked ominously under their gaze, an open invitation to constipation and kidney stones. (LH)
'I was just hoping that if I didn’t say anything you’d stop trying to explain things to me.' (LH)
'A good wizard, Rincewind,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘Not particularly bright, but, frankly, I’ve never been quite happy with intelligence. An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.' (LH)
'... you know that religion that thinks that whirling around in circles is a form of prayer?'
'Oh, yes. The Hurtling Whirlers of Klatch.'
'Mine is like that, only we go more in ... straight lines. Yes. That's it. Speed is a sacrament.'
'You believe it gives you some sort of eternal life?'
'Not eternal, as such. More ... well, just more really. More life.' (LH)
'You're just a coward really, aren't you?'
'Yes, but I've never understood what's wrong with the idea. It takes guts to run away, you know. Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.' (LH)
‘It’s just a walk in the park!’
‘You mean people are going to mug us and steal all our money and kick us viciously in the ribs?’ said Rincewind. (LH)
'We ought to get him home as soon as possible. What’s the usual direction? “Second star to the left and straight on ‘til morning”?’
‘I think that may very probably be the stupidest piece of astronavigation ever suggested,’ said Rincewind. (LH)
... it had always seemed to Rincewind that if you had to go a long way away it’d be nice to stay at home while you did it ... (SODW)
'You have nothing to fear but fear itself.'
'Oh, is that so? What help is that? You think that makes it better? Well, let me tell you, some of that fear can be pretty big and nasty -' (SD)
'"Live and let live”, you know that’s always been my motto. Well, “let me live”, really, but that’s almost the same thing.' (SODW)
'Not dying out is some kind of achievement, is it?’ said the Lecturer of Recent Runes.
‘Best kind there is, sir.' (SODW)
Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went ‘click’in the woodwork. He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms, therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky. (TG)
'I don’t like it. It’s too quiet.’
‘No sir, no sir,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s not the time not to like it. The time not to like it is when it’s suddenly as noisy as all hell, sir.' (TG)
'We say Seeing is Believing…and I thought about that, and it’s not really true. We don’t believe in chairs. Chairs are just things that exist.’
‘So?’ said Ridcully.
‘We don’t believe in things we can see. We believe in things that we can’t see.' (TG)
'.... if you don't know what you're getting into, naked always works,' said Rincewind. 'It's the all-purpose suit. At home in every culture.' (DW)
He is a coward. He is happy with this description. He would rather people said that Rincewind is a coward than Rincewind was incredibly brave right up to the point where he was bitten in half. (PP)
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant ‘idiot’. (COM)
'That’s what’s so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you’re so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can’t remember what happens next.' (COM)
‘… if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet armour and shouting “All gods are bastards’. (COM)
Rincewind opened his mouth to reply but felt the words huddle together in his throat, reluctant to emerge into a world that was rapidly going mad. (COM)
‘I assure you the thought never crossed my mind, lord.’
‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander’. (COM)
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic and utterly humourless rictus. It was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out, picking scraps out of the teeth. (COM)
'You mean they hate water?' said Twoflower.
‘No, that wouldn’t work,’ said Rincewind. ‘Hate is an attracting force,
just like love. They really loathe it, the very idea of it revolts them.' (COM)
'You’re a defeatist.’
‘Defeatist! That’s because I’m going to be defeated.’
‘You’re your own worst enemy, Rincewind,’ said the sword.
Rincewind looked up at the grinning men.
‘Bet?’ he said wearily. (COM)
I can’t be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I’d be mad, and I’m not made, so trees can’t talk. (LF)
Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.
On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away. (LF)
Rincewind had generally been reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. (LF)
Rincewind was a city wizard and, although he was aware that there were various differences among types of tree by which their nearest and dearest could tell them apart, the only thing he knew for certain was that the end without leaves on fitted into the ground. (LF)
‘Well, it just reeks ambience.’
‘Oh.’
‘What’s ambience?’ said Swires, sniffing cautiously and wearing the kind of expression that said that he hadn’t done it, whatever it was.
‘I think it’s a kind of frog,’ said Rincewind. (LF)
Owing largely to inefficiency Rincewind had consistently failed to die at the right time, and if there’s one thing that Death does not like it is unpunctuality. (LF)
He believed, against all experience, that the world was fundamentally understandable, and that if he could only equip himself with the right mental toolbox he could take the back off and see how it worked. He was, of course, dead wrong. (LF)
... Rincewind had in any case seen his past life flash in front of his eyes so many times that he could sleep through the boring bits ... (LF)
'They do say if it’s summa cum laude, then the living is easy - ' (LF)
'Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead…' (LF)
'You run away a lot,’ said one of the voices. ‘That is good. You are a survivor.’
‘Survivor? I’ve nearly been killed dozens of times!’
‘Exactly.' (LF)
'What shall we do?’said Twoflower.
‘Panic?’ said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival. (LF)
‘I’m a firm believer in reincarnation. What would you like to come back as?’
‘I don’t want to go,’ said Rincewind firmly. (LF)
Rincewind knew what orgasms were, of course, he’d had a few in his time, sometimes even in company. (LF)
Rincewind opened his eyes and lay for a moment looking up at the stuffed reptile. It was not the best thing to see when awakening from troubled dreams ... (LF)
Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons of Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn’t even notice them. (LF)
That’s old Twoflower. Rincewind thought. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. And treads on it. It’s right what Cohen says. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect. (LF)
… ‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’ (S)
‘Sorry. I don’t know why, but the prospect of certain death in unknown lands at the claws of exotic monsters isn’t for me. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t get the hang of it. Each to their own, that’s what I say, and I was cut out for boredom.’ (S)
‘You’re safe now.’
‘What, you mean I’m all alone with a female homicidal maniac?’ said Rincewind. ‘Fine.’ (S)
He opened his eyes. The girl was wearing a demure white lace dress with fetching puffed sleeves. He opened his mouth. He realised with absolute clarity that up until now the trouble he had been in was simple, modest and nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of given a decent chance or, failing that, a running start. (S)
Rincewind sagged. ‘Why me?’ he moaned.
For the good of the University. For the honour of wizardry. For the sake of the world. For your heart’s desire. And I’ll freeze you alive if you don’t.
Rincewind breathed a sigh almost of relief. He wasn’t good on bribes, or cajolery, or appeals to his better nature. But threats, now, threats were familiar. He knew where he stood with threats. (S)
He wasn’t any good at magic, but he’d had a hundred per cent success at staying alive up to now and didn’t want to spoil the record. All he needed to do was to learn how to swim in the time it took to dive into the sea. It was worth a try. (S)
It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting. (S)
It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind. (S)
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met. (S)
The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do. (S)
'If we get a chance,’ whispered Rincewind to Nijel, ‘we run, right?’
‘Where to?’
‘From,’ said Rincewind, ‘the important word is from.' (S)
'... Death walks abroad,’ said Nijel.
‘Abroad I don’t mind, said Rincewind. '‘They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.' (S)
'Rincewind, I’ve known you for an hour and I’m astonished you’ve lived even that long!’
‘Yes, but I have, haven’t I? I’ve got a sort of talent for it. Ask anyone. I’m an addict.’
‘Addicted to what?’
‘Life. I got hooked on it at an early age and I don’t want to give it up...' (S)
‘I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.’ (S)
'I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet!’ he hissed. ‘I’m afraid of grounds!’
‘You mean heights,’ said Conina. ‘And stop being silly.’
‘I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you.' (S)
‘I’ve often wondered what being poor was like.’
‘You’re going to get a huge opportunity to find out.’
‘Will I need training?’
‘It comes naturally,’ said Rincewind. ‘You pick it up as you go along.’ (S)
Many people who had got to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner’s canary and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained. (S)
'My father always said that death is but a sleep,’ said Conina.
‘Yes, the hat told me that,’ said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls.
‘But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.' (S)
'This is a robe,’ said Rincewind quickly. ‘And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.' (S)
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,’ said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. ‘Been completely at a loss my whole life.’ He hesitated. ‘I think it’s called being human …’ (S)
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)
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)
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)
'What’re quantum mechanics?'
'I don’t know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.' (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)
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)
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)
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)
'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)
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)
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)
'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)
'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)
'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)
'I'll always remember the taste of Mr Dibbler's sausages.'
‘People do.’
‘A once-in-a-lifetime experience.’
‘Frequently.’ (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)
... in Rincewind’s experience there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a scream and a good ten yards’ start. (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)
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)
Rincewind had always assumed that the purpose of running away was to be able to run away another day. (IT)
‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
‘Oh,that,’said Rincewind.‘No problem there. I’m good at that.’ (IT)
'Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.' (IT)
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. (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)
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 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)
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)
'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)
'... behind him someone screamed Rincewind’s nickname, which was: ‘Don’t let him get away!' (IT)
He wasn't certain what unisex was but expected that it was what he normally experienced. (IT)
'When seven men go out to fight an army100,000 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)
... Rincewind had always considered that life was no more than a series of temporary measures strung together. (IT)
He was not going to be found wanting when duty called. He did not intend to be found at all. (LC)
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Metres, the Mile, the Marathon – he’d run them all. (LC)
'Haven’t you ever noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?’
‘Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that too,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.’
‘Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.’
‘Yes, but it’s the important one.' (LC)
Now he remembered, with a shudder, some of the great wheezes he’d had on similar occasions. Spaghetti and custard, that’d been a good one. Deep-fried peas, that’d been another triumph. And then there’d been the time when it had seemed a really good idea to eat some flour and yeast and then drink some warm water, because he’d run out of bread and after all that was what the stomach saw, wasn’t it? The thing about late-night cookery was that it
made sense at the time. It always has some logic behind it. It just wasn’t the kind of logic you’d use around midday. (LC)
A flash of inspiration struck him with all the force and brilliance that ideas have when they’re travelling through beer. (LC)
'I think maybe I’d better make you up the cure for drinking too much beer, mate.’
‘What’s the cure?’
‘More beer.' (LC)
'Got any requests for your last breakfast?’
‘Something that takes a really really long time to prepare?’ said Rincewind. (LC)
'So now we know,’said Archchancellor Rincewind. ‘We’ve got to keep you just drunk enough so that Dibbler's pies sound tasty, but not so drunk that it causes lasting brain damage.’
‘That’s a very narrow range we’ve got there,’ said the Dean. (LC)
‘I’ll have a pint of Chardonnay, please.’
‘You takin’ the piss?’
‘No, I’d like to leave it here-' (LC)
'Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?'
YES
'Ghastly thought, really.’ Rincewind shuddered. ‘Oh, gods, I’ve just had another one. Suppose I am just about to die and this is my whole life passing in front of my eyes?’
I THINK PERHAPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. PEOPLE’S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED ‘LIVING’. (LC)
'Want to stay on here? I had a word with your Dean. He gave you a bloody good reference.’
‘Did he? What did he say?’
‘He said if I could get you to do any work for me I’d be lucky’, said Bill. (LC)
Oh, I never stop to find out why people are chasing me, sir. I never look behind either. That'd be rather silly, sir.' (LH)
'Are you a friend of his?'
'Well, we've met a couple of times and he didn't kill me,' said Rincewind. 'That probably counts as a a "yes".' (LH)
'I've been living my life for a long time. I know how it works.' (LH)
'It’s very simple. I’m volunteering. I just don’t wish to. But, after all, when did that ever have anything to do with anything?' (LH)
'It will certainly be a challenge to go where no one has gone before,’ said Carrot.
‘Wrong! We’re going where no one has come back from before.' (LH)
Rincewind stared at the badge. He’d never had one before. Well, that was technically a lie ... he’d had one that said ‘Hello, I Am 5 Today!’, which was just about the worst possible present to get when you are six. (LH)
'What is that on your badge, Captain Carrot?'
‘Mission motto, sir,’ said Carrot cheerfully. ‘Morituri Nolumus Mori. Rincewind suggested it.’
‘I imagine he did,’ said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly. ‘And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind?’
‘Er…’ Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape. ‘Er…roughly speaking, it means, “We who are about to die don’t want to”, sir.’ (LH)
As one man, they turned in their seats to look at the Experimental Privy Mk 2. Mk 1 had worked – Leonard’s devices tended to– but since the key to its operation was that it tumbled very fast on a central axis while in use it had been abandoned after a report by its test pilot (Rincewind) that, whatever you had in mind when you went in, the only thing you wanted to do once inside was get out.
Mk 2 was as yet untried. It creaked ominously under their gaze, an open invitation to constipation and kidney stones. (LH)
'I was just hoping that if I didn’t say anything you’d stop trying to explain things to me.' (LH)
'A good wizard, Rincewind,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘Not particularly bright, but, frankly, I’ve never been quite happy with intelligence. An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.' (LH)
'... you know that religion that thinks that whirling around in circles is a form of prayer?'
'Oh, yes. The Hurtling Whirlers of Klatch.'
'Mine is like that, only we go more in ... straight lines. Yes. That's it. Speed is a sacrament.'
'You believe it gives you some sort of eternal life?'
'Not eternal, as such. More ... well, just more really. More life.' (LH)
'You're just a coward really, aren't you?'
'Yes, but I've never understood what's wrong with the idea. It takes guts to run away, you know. Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.' (LH)
‘It’s just a walk in the park!’
‘You mean people are going to mug us and steal all our money and kick us viciously in the ribs?’ said Rincewind. (LH)
'We ought to get him home as soon as possible. What’s the usual direction? “Second star to the left and straight on ‘til morning”?’
‘I think that may very probably be the stupidest piece of astronavigation ever suggested,’ said Rincewind. (LH)
... it had always seemed to Rincewind that if you had to go a long way away it’d be nice to stay at home while you did it ... (SODW)
'You have nothing to fear but fear itself.'
'Oh, is that so? What help is that? You think that makes it better? Well, let me tell you, some of that fear can be pretty big and nasty -' (SD)
'"Live and let live”, you know that’s always been my motto. Well, “let me live”, really, but that’s almost the same thing.' (SODW)
'Not dying out is some kind of achievement, is it?’ said the Lecturer of Recent Runes.
‘Best kind there is, sir.' (SODW)
Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went ‘click’in the woodwork. He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms, therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky. (TG)
'I don’t like it. It’s too quiet.’
‘No sir, no sir,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s not the time not to like it. The time not to like it is when it’s suddenly as noisy as all hell, sir.' (TG)
'We say Seeing is Believing…and I thought about that, and it’s not really true. We don’t believe in chairs. Chairs are just things that exist.’
‘So?’ said Ridcully.
‘We don’t believe in things we can see. We believe in things that we can’t see.' (TG)
'.... if you don't know what you're getting into, naked always works,' said Rincewind. 'It's the all-purpose suit. At home in every culture.' (DW)
He is a coward. He is happy with this description. He would rather people said that Rincewind is a coward than Rincewind was incredibly brave right up to the point where he was bitten in half. (PP)
