you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.’
*
Droit de mortis: broadly speaking, the acceleration of a wizard through the ranks of wizardry by killing off more senior wizards. It is a practice currently in abeyance, since a few enthusiastic attempts to remove Mustrum Ridcully resulted in one wizard being unable to hear properly for two weeks. Ridcully felt that there was indeed room at the top, and he was occupying all of it.
*
It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they’ve always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Caper). Sometimes a hammer and sickle turn up on the cover. This is probably caused by sunspot activity, since they are invariably the wrong way round.
*
Any seasoned traveller soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a ‘regional speciality’, because all the term means is that the dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than eat it. But hosts still press it upon distant guests anyway: ‘Go on, have the dog’s head stuffed with macerated cabbage and pork noses - it’s a regional speciality.’
*
The University’s housekeeper [it had been unkindly said] had a face full of chins; there was a glossiness about her that put some people in mind of a candle that had been kept in the warm for too long. There wasn’t anything approaching a straight line anywhere on Mrs Whitlow, until she found that something hadn’t been dusted properly, when you could use her lips as a ruler.
*
The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame.
*
‘Remember what we’d say in those days?’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘ “Never trust a wizard over sixty-five”? Whatever happened?’
‘We got past the age of sixty-five, Senior Wrangler.’
*
The Bursar was, as he would probably be the first to admit, not the most mentally stable of people. He would probably be the first to admit that he was a tea-strainer.
*
Once a moderately jolly wizard camped by a dried-up waterhole under the shade of a tree that he was completely unable to identify. And he swore as he hacked and hacked at a can of beer, saying, ‘What kind of idiots put beer in tins?’
*
Beer! It was only water, really, with stuff in it. Wasn’t it? And most of what was in it was yeast, which was practically a medicine and definitely a food. In fact, when you thought about it, beer was only a kind of runny bread.
*
‘Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?’
YES.
‘Ghastly thought, really’ Rince-wind shuddered. ‘Oh, gods, I’ve just had another one. Suppose I am just about to die and this is my whole life passing in front of my eyes?’
I THINK PERHAPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. PEOPLE’S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED ‘LIVING’.
MIGHTILY Oats has not picked a good time to be a priest.
He thought he’d come to Lancre for a simple ceremony. Now lie’s caught tip in a war between vampires and witches.
There’s Voting Agnes, who is really in two minds about everything. Magrat, who is trying to combine witchcraft and nappies, Nanny Ogg … and Granny Weatherwax, who is big trouble.
And the vampires are intelligent. They’ve got style and fancy waistcoats. They’re out of the casket, and want a bite of the future. Mightily Oats knows he has a prayer, but he wishes he had an axe.
In Lancre the only truly flat places were tables and the top of some people’s heads.
*
Those who are inclined to casual cruelty say that inside a fat girl is a thin girl and a lot of chocolate.
*
Agnes thought that a dumpy girl should not wear a tall hat, especially with black. It made her look as though someone had dropped a liquorice-flavoured ice-cream cone.
*
The Lancrastian idea of posh sanitation was a non-slippery path to the privy and a