Nanny Ogg changed the way people thought, even if it was only for a few minutes. She left people thinking they were slightly better people. They weren’t, but as Nanny said, it gave them something to live up to. (W)
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You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them the up the evolutionary ladder. (TOT)
When he was a boy, Ponder Stibbons had imagined that wizards would be powerful democrats-gods able to change the whole world at the flick of a finger, and then he'd grown up and found that they were tiresome old men who worries about the state of their feet and, in harm's way, would even bicker about the origin of the phrase 'in harm's way'.
It had never struck him that evolution works in all kinds of ways. There were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard. (LC) 'I think that before we made humanity, we broke the mould.' (LC)
'I don't think you can fight a whole universe, sir!'
'It's the prerogative of every life form, Mr Stibbons!' (DW) ... the accepted wisdom on Discworld was that monkeys were the descendants of people who had given up trying. (TG)
... the presence of beer always greases the rungs of the evolutionary ladder ... (TG)
Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time. (SM)
... Ridcully believed that everything had come into being by chance or, in the particular case of the Dean, out of spite. (SM)
‘If Darwin were here I’d demand to know what theory of “natural selection” can possibly have produced something as ugly and useless as an oyster.’ (LU)
That's Nature for you in a nutshell. Always dealing off the bottom of the pack.
No wonder they called her a mother ... (GG) 'Bein’ around for millions of years is not an achievement. Even lumps of stone can manage it.' (TG)
'Not dying out is some kind of achievement, is it?’ said the Lecturer of Recent Runes.
‘Best kind there is, sir.' (SODW) ... if there was any truth at all in Ponder’s tentative theory that things did change into other things, it led to the depressing thought that, well, the world was filling up with quitters, creatures which – instead of staying where they
were, and really making a go of life in the ocean or the swamp or wherever – were running away to lurk in some niche and grow legs '... what the hell is this picture all about?’
It showed on the left, a rather hunched-up, ape-like figure. As it crossed the page, it gradually arose and grew considerably less hairy until it was striding confidentially towards the edge of the page, perhaps pleased that it had essayed this perilous journey without at any time showing its genitals. ‘Looks like me when I’m getting up in the mornings,’said the Dean, who was reading over his shoulder.' (SODW) 'Well, I for one have never believed all that business about dead animals turning into stone,’said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It’s against reason. What’s in it for them?’
‘So how do you explain fossils, then?’ said Ponder. ‘Ah, you see, I don’t,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, with a triumphant smile. ‘It saves so much trouble in the long run.' (LC) 'I don’t think I’m related to any apes,’ said the Senior Wrangler thoughtfully. ‘I mean, I’d know, wouldn’t I? I’d get invited
to their weddings and so on. My parents would have said something like, “Don’t worry about Uncle Charlie, he’s supposed to smell like that,” wouldn’t they?' (LC) And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises. But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. One day a tortoise will learn how to fly. (SG) Everything that exists, yearns to live. That’s what the cycle of life is all about. That’s the engine that drives the great biological pumps of evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the very top – which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all that effort. (RM)
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone.
This is probably fine from the species’ point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig. (RM) "Some people” – and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past – “think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is." (E)
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) |
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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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