fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches. (ER)
... gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human
fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches. (ER)
0 Comments
Of course, like druids everywhere they believed in the essential unity of all life, the healing power of plants, the natural rhythm of the seasons and the burning alive of anyone who didn’t approach all this in the right frame of mind
He could, though, just make out a miniature replica of Cori Celesti, upon whose utter peak the world’s quarrelsome and
somewhat bourgeois gods lived in a palace of marble, alabaster and uncut moquette three piece suites they had chosen to call Dunmanifestin. It was always a considerable annoyance to any Disc citizen with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell. (LF) ... on the disc, the Gods are not so much worshipped as blamed. (COM)
No-one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it’s like having the auditors in
unexpectedly. (P) The god currently gaining popularity was Om, who never answered prayers or manifested himself. It was easy to respect an invisible god. It was the ones that turned up everywhere, often drunk, that put people off. (SODW)
Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see. (NW)
Ankh-Morpork did not have many hospitals. All the Guilds maintained their own sanitariums, and there were a few public ones run by the odder religious organizations, like the Balancing Monks, but by and large medical assistance was nonexistent and people had to die inefficiently, without the aid of doctors. It was generally thought that the existence of cures encouraged slackness and was in any case probably against Nature’s way. (GG)
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)
'No sane mortal is truly free, because true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes.' (GP)
The Captain frowned. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?’
‘A bit of a poser, that,’ agreed the mate. ‘I s’pose it makes up for ‘em ... enjoying themselves all the time when they’re alive, too?’ He looked puzzled. Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious. (SG) Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock
a leg to allow the sun to go past. Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once. (WS) There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics.
An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis. (COM) There are the Brothers of Cool, a reserved and secretive sect which believes that only through ultimate coolness can the universe be comprehended, and that black works with everything, and that chrome will never truly go out of style. (TOT)
The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select. (LL)
The cemetery of Small Gods was for people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked Misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very
much. (NW) ‘Many people find faith a great solace,’ he said. He wished he was one of them.
‘Good.’ ‘Really? Somehow I thought you’d argue.’ ‘It’s not my place to tell ‘em what to believe, if they act decent.’ ‘But it’s not something that you feel drawn to, perhaps, in the darker hours?’ ‘No. I’ve already got a hot water bottle.' (CJ) ‘But you read a lot of books, I’m thinking. Hard to have faith, ain’t it, when you’ve read too many books?' (CJ)
‘Just as Om reached out his hand to save the prophet Brutha from the torture, so will he spread his wings over me in my time of trial,’ said Oats, but he sounded as though he was trying to reassure himself rather than Nanny. He went on: ‘I’ve got a pamphlet if you would like to know more,’ and this time the tone was much more positive, as if the existence of Om was a little uncertain whereas the existence of pamphlets was obvious to any open-minded rational-thinking person. (CJ)
…Dil was realising that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed any more. (P)
Not that he had anything against belief. People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people. (P)
Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armour-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion. (GG)
|
Author
The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
All
Archives
March 2023
|