‘... you doctors aren’t supposed to hurt people, are you?’
‘Only in the course of normal incompetence.’ (NW)
‘Only in the course of normal incompetence.’ (NW)
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'... them as has it in them to shine will shine through six layers of muck, whereas those we ain't shiny won't shine however much you buff 'em.' (TOT)
'... I'm useless. I was educated to be useless. What we've always been supposed to do is hang around until there's a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we've mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas mostly.' (TT)
'... I'm the kind of person heroes aren't.' (AM)
... she lived in hope, and prepared her granddaughter for a royal life by seeing to it, whenever possible, that Ermintrude was not taught anything that could possibly be of any practical use whatsoever. (N)
It had always seemed to him that one of the major flaws in the whole business of opera was the audience. They were quite unsuitable. The only ones worse than the ones who didn't know anything at all about music, and whose idea of a sensible observation was 'I liked that bit near the end when her voice went wobbly' were the ones who thought they did .... (Ma)
'You've never been musical, Dean,' said Ridcully. 'It's one of your good points.' (SM)
… there’s nothing more useless in the world than a groom just before the wedding. (MA)
Brother Preptil, the master of music, had described Brutha’s voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. (SG)
The Librarian indicated with some surprisingly economical gestures that most wizards would not find their own bottom with both hands. (GG)
Abrim laughed. It’s wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it. (S)
… ‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’ (S)
Like pillion passengers since the dawn of time, he persisted in leaning the wrong way. (ER)
‘And you say it actually managed to get airborne?’
‘It flew like a bird,’ said Granny. The dwarf lit a pipe. ‘I should very much like to see that bird,’ he said reflectively. ‘I should imagine it’s quite something to watch a bird like that.’ (ER) Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herrod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled ‘Me, who does the telling’ and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled ‘Everyone else.’
Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly. (LC) 'You're going to need a powerful lot of nomes to do all this. And they're going to need training.'
'But, but all that they'd have to do is pull and push when they're told, won't they?' Dorcas hummed under his breath again. Masklin got the impression that he always did that if he was going to break some bad news. 'Well laddie,' he said. 'I'm six, I've seen a lot of people and I've got to tell you, if you lined up ten nomes and shouted "Pull", four of them would push and two of them would say "Pardon?" That's how people are.' (Truck) 'An’ they willnae let me play doon there on account o’ them sayin’ my playin’ sounds like a spider tryin’ to fart throught its ears…' (WFM)
Crash hefted his guitar and played a chord.
‘My word!’ said Ridcully. ‘Sir?’ ‘That sounded exactly like a cat trying to go to the lavatory through a sewn-up bum.' (SM) Perdita remembered Magrat bringing a guitar to a Hogswatchnight party once and singing wobbly folk songs with her eyes shut in a way that suggested that she really believed in them. She hadn’t been able to play, but this was all right because she couldn’t sing, either. (LL)
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of ‘Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory’ school of applied warfare. But Rust’s lack
of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts. (NW) He was extremely good at delegating. But the talent requires people on the other end of the chain to be good at being delegated on to. (MM)
Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards – not ‘not doing magic’ because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you know how easy it is. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again. (GP)
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.
All over the entire room, sometimes. (MP) Downstairs, Sybil had cooked him a meal. She wasn’t a very good cook. This was fine by Vimes, because he wasn’t a very good eater. (J)
'It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of going into teaching?’
Death’s face was a mask of terror. Well it was always a mask of terror, but this time he meant it to be. (M) |
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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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