A drink from the Ankh would quite probably rob a man of his memory, or at least cause things to happen to him that he would in no account wish to recall. (SM)
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There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification. (P)
Throat took a deep breath of the thick city air. Real air. You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air. You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years. (MP)
People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in
all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory. (RM) Horse dung made a good fuel, but the Horse People had a lot to learn about air conditioning, starting with what it meant. (LF)
Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people. The fresh rain glistened on the panorama of towers and rooftops, all unaware of the teeming, rancorous world it was dropping into. Luckier rain fell on upland sheep, or whispered gently over forests, or pattered somewhat incestuously into the sea. Rain that fell on Ankh-Morpork, though, was rain that was in trouble. They did terrible things to water, in Ankh-Morpork. Being drunk was only the start of its problems. (GG)
The other legend, not normally recounted by citizens, is that at an even earlier time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and on this boat they took two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water so - the story runs - they tipped it over the side, and called it Ankh-Morpork. (P)
Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound. (M)
Ankh-Morpork!
Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course – it was not round and shiny – but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc. (LF) It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the
mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000), qualify under the term ‘running’ or, for that matter, ‘water'. (RM) Of course, Ankh-Morpork’s citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure in any case. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed. (S)
It had the thick texture of authentic Ankh water - too stiff to drink, too runny to plough. (ER)
There are said to be some mystic rivers one drop of which can steal a man’s life away. After its turbid passage through the twin cities the Ankh could have been one of them. (COM)
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