The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,4

varicose veins had traced the street map of quite a large city …

*

‘When I was a young man, carving my name in the world, well, then I liked my women red-haired and fiery’

‘Ah.’

‘And then I grew a little older and for preference I looked for a woman with blonde hair and the glint of the world in her eye.’

‘Oh? Yes?’

‘But then I grew a little older again and I came to see the point of dark women of a sultry nature.’

He paused. Rincewind waited.

‘And?’ he said. ‘Then what? What is it that you look for in a woman now?’

Cohen turned one rheumy blue eye on him.

‘Patience,’ he said.

*

Cohen [had] .. . spent his life living rough under the sky [and] knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn’t find a pipe, a book was your man every time.

Cohen realized people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.

*

‘If you kill me a thousand will take my place,’ said the man, who was now backed against the wall.

‘Yes,’ said Cohen, in a reasonable tone of voice, ‘but that isn’t the point, is it? The point is, you’ll be dead.’

*

Greyhald Spold, currently the oldest wizard on the Disc and determined to keep it that way, has been very busy. The servants have been dismissed. The doorways have been sealed with a paste made from powdered mayflies, and protective octograms have been drawn on the windows. Rare and rather smelly oils have been poured in complex patterns on the floor; in the very centre of the room is the eightfold octogram of Withholding, surrounded by red and green candles. And in the centre of that is a box, lined with red silk and yet more protective amulets. Because Greyhald Spold knows that Death is looking for him, and has spent many years designing an impregnable hiding place.

He has just set the complicated clockwork of the lock and shut the lid, lying back in the knowledge that here at last is the perfect defence against the most ultimate of all his enemies, although as yet he has not considered the important part that airholes must play in an enterprise of this kind.

And right beside him, very close to his ear, a voice has just said: DARK IN HERE, ISN’T IT?

*

Seven league boots are a tricksy form of magic at best, and the utmost caution must be taken in using a means of transport which, when all is said and done, relies for its effectiveness on trying to put one foot twenty-one miles in front of the other.

Cohen had heard of fighting fair, and had long ago decided he wanted no part of it.

Twoflower didn’t just look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles, Rincewind knew – he looked at it through a rose-tinted brain, too, and heard it through rose-tinted ears.

*

There was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on as it turned a corner.

‘His name’s Twoflower. He isn’t from these parts.’

‘Doeshn’t look like it. Friend of yoursh?’

‘We’ve got this sort of hate-hate relationship, yes.’

That’s old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. And treads on it.

*

Then they all heard it; a tiny distant crunching, like something moving very quickly over the snow crust.

… It was louder now, a crisp rhythm like someone eating celery very fast.

*

Rincewind was to magic what a bicycle is to a bumblebee.

*

Trolls were not unknown in Ankh-Morpork, of course, where they often got employment as bodyguards. They tended to be a bit expensive to keep until they learned about doors and didn’t simply leave the house by walking aimlessly through the nearest wall.

*

There were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn’t take you seriously until you’d actually killed them, by which time it didn’t really matter anyway.

*

‘It’s the star, friend,’ the man said. ‘Haven’t you seen it