The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,26

Headaches.

It contained forbidden knowledge.

Well, not actually forbidden. No one had ever gone so far as forbidding it. Apart from anything else, in order to forbid it you’d have to know what it was, which was forbidden. But it definitely contained the sort of information which, once you knew it, you wished you didn’t.

‘Come on,’ said Gaspode. ‘It’s not right, you being alone in a lady’s boodwah.’

‘I’m not alone,’ Victor said. ‘She’s with me.’

‘That’s the point,’ said Gaspode.

‘Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?’ said Dibbler.

‘He says he can’t,’ said Victor.

Dibbler hesitated. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose he should know.’

*

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

*

As the magic of the movies infects everyone, there are spillages from our own roundworld.

‘I don’t know what it’s called, but we’re doing one about going to see a wizard. Something about following a yellow sick toad,’ a man in one half of a lion suit explained to a companion in the queue.

*

A Man and A Woman Aflame With Passione in A Citie Riven by Sivil War!

Brother against brother! Women in crinoline dresses slapping people’s faces! A mighty dynasty brought low!

A great city aflame!

All it needed was a title. Something with a ring to it. Something that people would remember. Something – Dibbler scratched his chin with the pen – that said that the affairs of ordinary people were so much chaff in the great storms of history. Storms, that was it. Good imagery, a storm. You got thunder. Lightning. Rain. Wind.

Wind. That was it!

He crawled up to the top of the sheet and, with great care, wrote:

BLOWN AWAY.

*

Soll was standing over the artist who lettered the cards …

The lettering artist tugged at his sleeve.

‘I was just wondering, Mr Soll, what you wanted me to put in the big scene now—’

‘Don’t worry me now, man!’

‘But if you could just give me an idea—’

Soll firmly unhooked the man’s hand from his sleeve. ‘Frankly’ he said, ‘I don’t give a damn,’ and he strode off towards the set.

The artist was left alone. He picked up his paintbrush. His lips moved silently, shaping themselves around the words.

Then he said, ‘Hmm. Nice one.’

*

According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles.

*

The real city had been burned down many times in its long history - out of revenge, or carelessness, or spite, or even just for the insurance. Most of the big stone buildings that actually made it a city, as opposed simply to a load of hovels all in one place, survived them intact and many people considered that a good fire every hundred years or so was essential to the health of the city since it helped to keep down the rats, roaches, fleas and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses.

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

There’s a bar like it in every town. It’s dimly lit and the drinkers, although they talk, don’t address their words to one another and they don’t listen, either. They just talk the hurt inside. It’s a bar for the derelict and the unlucky and all of those people who have been temporarily flagged off the racetrack of life and into the pits.

*

Yetis are a high-altitude species of troll, and quite unaware that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If it doesn’t, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.

*

An inviolable rule about buildings for the showing of moving pictures, applicable throughout the multi-verse, is that the ghastliness of the architecture around the back is inversely proportional to the glori-ousness of the architecture in the front. At the front: pillars, arches, gold leaf, lights. At the back: weird ducts, mysterious