Why is Young Sam’s nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in a city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle! (WMC)
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‘Never try to milk a chicken. It hardly ever works.' (WMC)
It’s hard to be an ornithologist and walk through a wood when all around you the world is shouting: ‘Bugger off, this is my bush! Aargh, the nest thief! Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red! (MR)
‘I live in a city. I know sparrows from starlings. After that everything’s a duck as far as I’m concerned.' (MR)
Sheep are not known for their conversation. (WFM)
…there’s nothing funnier than a heron trying to get airborne in a hurry. (WFM)
She thought animals were just people who hadn’t been paying enough attention. (AM)
They went on looking. He cracked. Practically anyone will crack before a sheep cracks. A sheep hasn’t got much that’s crackable. (LC)
Animals tended to like Nobby. He didn’t smell wrong. (J)
Sergeant Colon went back to his desk, surreptitiously opened his drawer and pulled out the book he was reading. It was called Animal Husbandry. He’d been a bit worried about the title - you heard stories about strange folk in the country - but it turned out to be nothing more than a book about how cattle and pigs and sheep should breed.
Now he was wondering where to get a book that taught them how to read. (FC) ...it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before. (MA)
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat. (SG)
The only reason you couldn’t say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away. (GG)
…the fastest animal on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually
achieve near light-speed in the Disc’s magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn’t there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren’t there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma only achieves a sense of identity when it is at rest – usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. (P) Fast was a word particularly associated with tortoises because they were not it. (P)
Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. (P)
The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronised rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. (P)
Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race. They hate every member of it, without making any distinction for rank or creed. (P)
Occupying the metterforical stalls were a rabble of rabbits, weasels, vermine, badgers, foxes, and miscellaneous creatures who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or being killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk. (WS)
The vermine is a small black and white relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions. Its skin is rare and highly valued, especially by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it. (S)
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. (ER)
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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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