'No, of course not. I am seriously suggesting that we give out degrees for extreme physical prowess.' (UA)
'Are you seriously suggesting that we give out degrees for mere physical prowess?' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
'No, of course not. I am seriously suggesting that we give out degrees for extreme physical prowess.' (UA)
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It was noon. Tiffany have invented the word noonlight, because she liked the sound of it. Anyone could be a witch at midnight, she’d thought, but you’d have to be really good to be a witch by noonlight. (W)
'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) As for Wobbler…Wobbler wasn’t even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn’t let him join. He had a Nerd Pride badge and he messed around with computers. What Wobbler wanted was to be a kid in milk-bottle-bottom glasses and a deformed anorak, who could write amazing software and be a millionaire by the time he was twenty, but he’d probably settle for just being someone whose computer didn’t keep smelling of burning plastic every time he touched it. (JB)
The repairing of the Kite was simple enough. Although gods, on the whole, do not feel at home around mechanical things, every pantheon everywhere in the universe finds its necessary to have some minor deity – Vulcan, Wayland, Dennis, Hephaistos –who knows how bits fit together and that sort of thing.
Most large organisations, to their regret and expense, have to have someone like that. (LH) The price of a good woman was proverbially above rubies, so a skillfully bad one was presumably worth a lot more. (MM)
'... a mistress was expected to be a woman of accomplishment in those days.’
She sighed. ‘Now, of course, the ability to spin upside down around a pole seems to be sufficient.' (MM) She was aware that she had a slight advantage over male werewolves in that naked women caused fewer complaints, although the downside was that they got some pressing invitations. Some kind of covering was essential, for modesty and the prevention of inconvenient bouncing, which was why fashioning impromptu clothes out of anything to hand was a lesser-known werewolf skill. (J)
Granny nodded approvingly.
‘That’s the way of it,’ she said. ‘It’s not what you’ve got that matters, it’s how you’ve got it.' (LL) When all hope was gone, you called for Granny Weatherwax, because she was the best.
And she always came. Always. But popular? No. Need is not the same as like. (W) 'Bein’ a soldier is not hard. If it was, soldiers would not be able to do it.' (MR)
... every army needs, in key if unglamorous posts, men who can reason and make lists and arrange provisions and baggage wagons and, in general, have an attention span greater than a duck. (NW)
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) 'Who are you? Time has stopped, the world is given over to…fairytales and monsters, and there’s a schoolteacher walking around?’
‘Best kind of person to have,’ said Susan. ‘We don’t like silliness. Anyway, I told you, I’ve inherited certain talents.’ ‘Like living outside time?’ ‘That’s one of them.’ ‘It’s a weird talent for a schoolteacher!’ ‘Good for marking, though,’ said Susan calmly. (TOT) Honestly, thought Susan, once you learn the arts of defending the Stationery Cupboard, outwitting Jason and keeping the class pet alive until the end of term, you’ve mastered at least half of teaching. (TOT)
'It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of going into teaching?’
Death’s face was a mask of terror. Well it was always a mask of terror, but this time he meant it to be. (M) If he concentrated, he could just hear Pismire playing the fluteharp; it was easy to tell, even with all the other instruments in the Deftmenes' own band, by the way the notes went all over the place without ever hitting the tune. Pismire always said there were some things you should care about enough to do badly. (CP)
'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)
The late (or at least severely delayed) Bergholt Stuttley Johnson was generally recognized as the worst inventor in the
world, yet in a very specialized sense. Merely bad inventors made things that failed to operate. He wasn’t among these small fry. Any fool could make something that did absolutely nothing when you pressed the button. He scorned such fumble-fingered amateurs. Everything he built worked. It just didn’t do what it said on the box. If you wanted a small ground-to-air missile, you asked Johnson to design an ornamental fountain. (H) 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) ‘What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?’ (MA)
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)
‘Talent just defines what you do,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t define what you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything.’ (S)
It was also acutely embarrassing to Mort’s family that the youngest son was not at all serious and had about the same
talent for horticulture that you would find in a dead starfish. It wasn’t that he was unhelpful, but he had the kind of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread. (M) |
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