The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,45
through the city on that first great day and the people would be silent when they saw their natural leader.
It never crossed his mind that anyone would say, ‘ ‘Ere, wot a toff! ‘Eave ‘arf a brick at ‘im!’
*
‘You sound a very educated man for a barbarian,’ said Rincewind.
‘I didn’t start out a barbarian. I used to be a school teacher. But I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.’
‘After being a teacher all your life?’
‘It did mean a change of perspective, yes.’
‘But … well … surely … the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death …’
Mr Saveloy brightened up. ‘Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?’
*
‘There’s a lot of waiting in warfare,’ said Boy Willie.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Saveloy. ‘I’ve heard people say that. They say there’s long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement.’
‘Not really’ said Cohen. ‘It’s more like short periods of waiting followed by long periods of being dead.’
*
There were a large number of ranks in the armies of the Empire, and many of them were untranslatable. Three Pink Pig and Five White Fang were, loosely speaking, privates, and not just because they were pale, vulnerable and inclined to curl up and hide when danger threatened.
*
Pushing their way angrily through the soldiers came an altogether different breed of warrior. They were taller, and heavier armoured, with splendid helmets and moustaches that looked like a declaration of war in themselves.
‘Wassat?’ said Cohen.
‘He’s a samurai,’ said Mr Saveloy.
One samurai glared at Cohen. He pulled a scrap of silk out of his armour and tossed it into the air. His other hand grabbed the hilt of his long, thin sword …
There was hardly even a hiss, but three shreds of silk tumbled gently to the ground.
‘Get back, Teach,’ said Cohen slowly. ‘I reckon this one’s mine. Got another hanky? Thanks.’
The samurai looked at Cohen’s sword. It was long, heavy and had so many notches it could have been used as a saw.
‘You’ll never do it,’ he said. ‘With that sword? Never.’
Cohen blew his nose noisily.
‘You say?’ he said. ‘Watch this.’
The handkerchief soared into the air. Cohen gripped his sword …
He’d beheaded three upward-staring samurai before the handkerchief started to tumble.
‘And the message is,’ said Cohen, ‘either fight or muck about, it’s up to you.’
*
Golem … They were usually just figures made out of clay and animated with some suitable spell or prayer. They pottered about doing simple odd jobs. The problem was not putting them to work but stopping them from working; if you set a golem to digging the garden and then forgot about it, you’d come back to find it’d planted a row of beans 1500 miles long.
Woolly Thinking. Which is like Fuzzy Logic, only less so.
THE Opera House, Ankb-Morpork…
… a huge, rambling building, where masked figures and hooded shadows do wicked deeds in the wings… where dying the death on stage is a little bit more than just a metaphor… where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by an evil mastermind in a hideously deformed evening dress…
Where…
… there’s a couple of old ladies in pointy hats eating peanuts in the gods and looking tip at the big chandelier and saying things like: ‘There’s an accident waiting to happen if ever I saw one.’
Yes … Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, the Discworld’s greatest witches, are back for an innocent night out at the opera.
So there’s going to be trouble (but nevertheless a good evening’s entertainment with murders you can really hum …)
Black Aliss; pushed into her own stove by a couple of kids, and everyone said it was a damn’ good thing, even if it took a whole week to clean the oven.
They said weapons couldn’t pierce her. Swords bounced off her skin. And she turned people into gingerbread and had a house made of frogs.
*
She stopped. At least, most of Agnes stopped. There was a lot of Agnes. It took some time for outlying regions to come to rest.
*
Agnes had woken up one morning with the horrible realization that she’d been saddled with a lovely personality. It was the lack of choice that rankled. No one had asked her, before she was born, whether she wanted a lovely personality or whether she’d prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take size 9 in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys.