'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)
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Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.16) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that the Heavenly Host and other essential services take up at least two thirds of this space, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for each human occupant – assuming that every creature that could be called ‘human’ is allowed in, and that the human race eventually totals a thousand times the number of humans alive up until now. This is such a generous amount of space that it suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races or- a happy thought – that pets are allowed. (LH)
'Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o’course.' (SG)
He couldn’t help remembering how much he’d wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they’d been starving – anything with meat on it would have done. (GG)
Lack of fingers was another big spur to the development of camel intellect. Human mathematical development had always been held back by everyone’s instinctive tendency, when faced with something really complex in the way of triform polynomials or parametric differentials, to count fingers. Camels started from the word go by counting numbers. (P)
It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations. (P)
A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. (MP)
Nomes are small. On the whole, small creatures don’t live for a long time. But perhaps they do live fast.
Let me explain. One of the shortest-lived creatures on the planet Earth is the adult common mayfly. It lasts for one day. The longest-living things are bristlecone pine trees, at 4,700 years and still counting. This may seem tough on mayflies. But the important thing is not how long your life is, but how long it seems. (Truck) 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)
'By gor’, that’s a bloody enormous cat.’
'It’s a lion,’ said Granny Weatherwax, looking at the stuffed head over the fireplace. ‘Must’ve hit the wall at a hell of a speed, whatever it was,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Someone killed it,’ said Granny Weatherwax, surveying the room. ‘Should think so,’ said Nanny. ‘If I’d seen something like that eatin’ its way through the wall I’d of hit it myself with a poker.' (WA) Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare. (LL)
'This is inhuman!’ said Rat-catcher 2.
‘No, it’s very human,’ said Keith. ‘It’s extremely human. There isn’t a beast in the world that’d do it to another living thing ...' (AM) The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying. It was much simpler with camels. (P)
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)
Fewer birds could sit more meekly than the Lancre wowhawk, or lappet-faced worrier, a carnivore permanently on the lookout for the vegetarian option. It spent most of its time asleep in any case, but when forced to find food it tended to sit on a branch out of the wind somewhere and wait for something to die. When in the mews the worriers would initially perch like other birds and then, talons clamped to the pole, doze off peacefully upside down.
Hodgesaargh bred them because they were found only in Lancre and he liked the plumage, but all reputable falconers agreed that for hunting purposes the only way you could reliably bring down prey with a wowhawk was by using it in a slingshot. (CJ) ... Verence being a king, was allowed a gyrfalcon, whatever the hell that was, any earls in the vicinity could fly a peregrine, and priests were allowed sparrowhawks. Commoners were just about allowed a stick to throw*.
Magrat found herself wondering what Nanny Ogg would be allowed – a small chicken on a spring probably. There was no specific falcon for a witch but, as a queen, the Lancre rules of falconry allowed her to fly the wowhawk or Lappet-faced Worrier. It was small and shortsighted and preferred to walk everywhere. It fainted at the sight of blood. And about twenty wowhawks could kill a pigeon, if it was a sick pigeon. She’d spent an hour with one on her wrist. It had wheezed at her, and eventually it had dozed off upside down. *If it wasn’t a big stick. (LL) Strictly speaking, Hodgesaargh wasn’t his real name. On the other hand, on the basis that someone’s real name is the name they introduce themselves to you by, he was definitely Hodgesaargh.
This was because the hawks and falcons in the castle mews were all Lancre birds and therefore naturally possessed of a certain ‘sod you’ independence of mind. After much patient breeding and training Hodgesaargh had managed to get them to let go of someone’s wrist, and now he was working on stopping them viciously attacking the person who had just been holding them i.e., invariably Hodgesaargh. (LL) 'Animals can’t murder. Only us superior races can murder. That’s one of the things that sets us apart from animals.' (LL)
'Our Sean read to me in the almanac where there’s all these fearsome wild beasts in foreign parts,’ he whispered. ‘Huge hairy things that leap out on travellers, it said. I’d hate to think what’d happen if they leapt out on mum and Granny.’
Magrat looked up into his big red face. ‘You will see no harm comes to them, won’t you?’ said Jason. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, hoping that he needn’t. ‘I’ll do my best.’ Jason nodded. ‘Only it said in the almanac that some of them were nearly extinct anyway,’ he said. (WA) Grammer Bevis wrinkled her forehead.
‘Magrat?’ she said. She tried to get a mental picture of the Ramtops’ youngest witch and recalled – well, not a face, just a slightly watery-eyed expression of hopeless goodwill wedged between a body like a maypole and hair like a haystack after a gale. A relentless doer of good works. A worrier. The kind of person who rescued small lost baby birds and cried when they died, which is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds. (WA) There is a type of girl who, while incapable of cleaning her bedroom even at knifepoint, will fight for the privilege of being allowed to spend the day shoveling manure in a stable. (SM)
People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.
There’s nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there’s a big turtle is far less amazing that the fact that there is a turtle anywhere. (LH) 'It's a wild-life preserve,' said the Thing.
Gurder looked shocked. 'What? Like jam? Made of animals?' (Wings) … nervousness runs through pigeons faster than a streaker through a convent ... (MM)
… when the gods made sheep they must’ve left their brains in their other coat. (W)
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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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