It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air. (SG)
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The most dangerous man in the world should be introduced.
He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead, and had marvelled at how well they’d been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labour. For several years he hadn’t moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There’s a certain type of person it’s very hard to imprison. (MA) And he read Principles of Accounting all morning, but just to make it interesting, he put lots of dragons in it. (W)
The previous governess had used various monsters and bogeymen as a form of discipline. There was always something waiting to eat or carry off bad boys and girls for crimes like stuttering or defiantly and aggravatingly persisting in writing with their left hand. There was always a Scissor Man waiting for a little girl who sucked her thumb, always a bogeyman in the cellar. Of such bricks is the innocence of childhood constructed. (H)
The important thing, she decided, was to stay calm. There was always a logical explanation for everything, even if you had to make it up. (SM)
'It’s not staying in the same place that’s the problem,’ said Nanny, ‘it’s not letting your mind wander.' (WA)
Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.
Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all. (WS) Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it. It was a different matter if people who ought to know better did it, though. She considered that the future was a frail enough thing at best, and if people looked at it hard they changed it. Granny had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn’t be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.
Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination. (ER) But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly is was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example, of value-added tax. Or Manchester.
He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester. (GO) Most gods were people-shaped; people don’t have much imagination, on the whole. Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to imagine an animal god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone in a really bad mask. Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is why there are so many. (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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