The thing about stories is that you have to pick the ones that last. (AM)
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'It’s just like I always tell my daughter,’ said the man. ‘Stories are just stories. Life is complicated enough as it is. We have to plan for the real world. There’s no room for the fantastic.’
‘Exactly,’ said the rat. And the man and the rat talked, as the long light faded into the evening. (AM) 'We all know what happens when a mysterious orphan turns up and challenges someone big and powerful, don’t we?
It’s like being the third and youngest son of a king. He can’t help but win!' She looked triumphantly at the crowd. But the crowd looked doubtful. They hadn’t read as many stories as Malicia, and were rather attached to the experience of real life, which is that when someone small and righteous takes on someone big and nasty he is grilled bread product, very quickly. (AM) 'And to think I thought it was an allegorical creature,’ said the priest.
‘Well? Even allegories have to live,’ said Granny Weatherwax. (CJ) One or two of the old barrows had been exposed over the years, their huge stones attracting their own folklore. If you left your unshod horse at one of them overnight and placed sixpence on the stone, in the morning the sixpence would be gone and you’d never see your horse again, either ... (CJ)
She knew there was such a thing as heroic odds. Songs and ballads and stories and poems were full of stories about one person single-handedly taking on and defeating a vast number of enemies.
Only now was it dawning on her that the trouble was that they were songs and ballads and stories and poems because they dealt with things that were, not to put too fine a point on it, untrue. She couldn’t now she had time to think about it, ever remember an example from history. (LL) Stories are not, on the whole, interested in swineherds who remain swineherds and poor and humble shoe-makers whose destiny is to die slightly poorer and much humbler. (WA)
This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time. (WA)
... the seeker after truth had found truths instead. The Third Journey of the Prophet Cena, for example, seemed remarkably like a retranslation of the Testament of Sand in the Laotan Book of the Whole. On one shelf alone he found forty-three remarkably similar accounts of a great flood, and in every single one of them a man very much like Bishop Horn had saved the elect of mankind by building a magical boat. Details varied of course. Sometimes the boat was made of wood, sometimes of banana leaves. Sometimes the news of the emerging dry land was brought by a swan,
sometimes by an iguana. Of course these stories in the chronicles of other religions were mere folktales and myth, while the voyage detailed in the Book of Cena was holy truth. But nevertheless. (CJ) 'And our lady friend, she thinks life works like a fairytale.'
'Well, that’s harmless, isn’t it?’ said Keith. ‘Yeah, but in fairy-tales, when someone dies…it’s just a word.' (AM) ... the Hogfather is a winter myth figure who, on Hogswatchnight, gallops from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliver presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings, and ham to all children who have been good. He says ‘Ho ho ho’ a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details which tell you it’s a tale for the little folk). There’s a song about him. It begins: You'd Better Watch Out ... (SM)
'... and then Jack chopped down the beanstalk, adding murder and ecological vandalism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned, but he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you’re a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.' (H)
'When seven men go out to fight an army100,000 times bigger there’s only one way it can end,’ said Twoflower.
‘Right. I’m glad you see sense.’ ‘They’ll win,’ said Twoflower. ‘They’ve got to. Otherwise the world’s just not working properly.' (IT) 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)
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)
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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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