Nobby was human, just like many other officers. It was just that he was the only one who had to carry a certificate to prove it. (NW)
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He'd thought it would be difficult, learning to drive, learning how a lorry worked, learning to read, but they were, well, just tasks. You could see all the difficulties before you started. If you work at them long enough, then you were bound to succeed. He'd been right. The difficult thing was going to be all the people. (Truck)
'You're going to need a powerful lot of nomes to do all this. And they're going to need training.'
'But, but all that they'd have to do is pull and push when they're told, won't they?' Dorcas hummed under his breath again. Masklin got the impression that he always did that if he was going to break some bad news. 'Well laddie,' he said. 'I'm six, I've seen a lot of people and I've got to tell you, if you lined up ten nomes and shouted "Pull", four of them would push and two of them would say "Pardon?" That's how people are.' (Truck) It occurred to Johnny, not for the first time, that the human mind, of which each of his friends was in possession of one almost standard sample, was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it'd carry on pointing the same way. If three-metre-tall Martians landed on the shopping mall, bought some greeting cards and a bag of sugar cookies and then took off again, within a day or two people would believe it never happened. (JD)
Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.
For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led. (SG) It was beginning to dawn on Masklin that there was a different sort of knowledge, and it consisted of the things you needed to understand in order to survive among other nomes. Things like: be very careful when you tell people things they don’t want to hear. And: the thought that they may be wrong makes people very angry. (Truck)
'Human being first, witch second; hard to remember, easy to do.' (ISWM)
'Oh, you know the sort of thing if you read the papers a lot,' said Ponder. I seriously think they think that it's their job to calm people down by first of all explaining why they should be overexcited and very worried.'
'Oh, yes, I know they do that,' said Glenda. 'How would people get worried if they weren't told how to be?' (UA) 'Everybody knows trolls eat people and spit them out. Everybody knows dwarfs cut off your legs. But at the same time everybody knows that what everybody knows is wrong.' (UA)
Dogs had a much easier sex life than humans, Gaspode decided. That was something to look forward to, if he ever managed to have one. (FE)
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)
'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)
'What's up with him?’ said Masklin.
Granny Morkie started to roll bandages in a businesslike way. No one needed them, but she believed in having a good supply. Enough for the whole world, apparently. ‘He’s having to think’’ she said. ‘That always worries people.' (Truck) The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails
if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed. (M) Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beermug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for. (Ma)
'You should always leave enough time for goodbye.' (LW)
'... sapience implies purpose.' (LW)
He knew how she felt. It was the way he felt himself, sometimes if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion. A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall. Luckily the sun always came up, people stirred, and you got on with stuff that distracted you from the reality.
The problem for Roberta Golding was that she was too smart to be distracted. For her, it was three a.m. all the time. (LW) 'If only we had laboratories to produce self-replicating scientists, to explore all the worlds. Ah, but we do! They're called university campuses.' (LW)
'You could learn all you need to know about human males from one miserable specimen.' (LW)
'You can't shit a shitter, you little shit.' (LW)
'The nice thing about artificial intelligence is that at least it's better than artificial stupidity.' (LW)
'Cahoots.' He repeated the word, forming the syllables with exaggerated motion of his lips. 'Lovely word, that. The kind of word that's necessary to use, purely for the pleasure of saying it.' (LW)
'All men are rudimentary creatures who respond to symbols a lot more basic than a habit and a crucifix.' (LW)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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