‘The trouble is, I can explain it in Dog, but you only listen in Human.’ (MP)
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When Mrs Whitlow was in the grip of acute class consciousness she could create aitches where nature never intended them to be. (MP)
The Librarian rolled his eyes. It was strange, he felt, that so-called intelligent dogs, horses and dolphins never had any difficulty indicating to humans the vital news of the moment e.g., that the three children were lost in the cave, or the train was about to take the line leading to the bridge that had been washed away or similar, while he, only a handful of chromosomes away from wearing a vest, found it difficult to persuade the average human to come out in the rain. (GG)
Ptraci didn’t just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations and melted the bridges for scrap. (P)
‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege. (ER)
… there was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and that all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on as it turned a corner. (LF)
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)
... Sergeant Colon did know the meaning of the word "irony". He thought it meant "sort of like iron". (RM)
The Senior Wrangler could do to a conversation what it takes quite thick treacle to do to the pedals of a precision watch. (RM)
'You should always leave enough time for goodbye.' (LW)
'Any three dwarfs having a sensible conversation will always end up having four points of view'. (RS)
Linsay was a left ear person, Valiente realised. He had seen plenty of them: their eyes glazed slightly and they stared fixedly at your left ear, while their mouths spouted the truth about flying saucers, the great world conspiracy, or one-born-every-minute evangelism. Inside everyone was a left ear person waiting to get out. (LE)
'A spill word is a word that somebody almost says, but doesn't.' (ISWM)
'Ye will bring to mind, brother o' mine, that there was times when ye should stick your head up a duck's bottom rather than talk?'
Daft Wullie looked down at his feet. 'Sorry Rob. I couldnae find a duck the noo.' (ISWM) The bringer of bad news is never popular, especially when it's on an empty plate. (UA)
'Never talk to people who write things down.' (MR)
Witches were very good at listening to what you weren’t saying. (W)
'He’s a man of few words, and he doesn’t know what either of them mean,’ people said, but not when he was within hearing. (CP)
... she was pleasant easygoing company, if you avoided allusion, irony, sarcasm, repartee, satire and words longer than ‘chicken’. (Th)
He'd long ago decided that if you spent all your time listening to what people actually said, you’d never have time to work out what they meant. (Dig)
Talking to the Watch was like tap-dancing on a landslide. If you were nimble you could stay upright, but you couldn’t steer and there were no brakes and you just knew that it was going to end in a certain amount of fuss. (MM)
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)
Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an
interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available. He was puzzled that people seemed to think he was a boring conversationalist. Why, he could talk about all kinds of clocks. Mechanical clocks, magical clocks, sand clocks, cuckoo clocks, the rare Hershebian beetle clocks…But for some reason he always ran out of listeners before he ran out of clocks. (TOT) He wished he liked people more, but somehow he could never get on with them. He never knew what to say. If life was a party, he wasn’t even in the kitchen. He envied the people who made it as far as the kitchen. (TOT)
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)
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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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