The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,7
approach to drainage.
*
The Shades: an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.
*
The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbours.
*
At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage - even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.
*
It wasn’t that Granny could make herself invisible, it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the foreground so that she wasn’t noticed.
*
Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic with a mind of its own …
One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orang-utan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves.
*
‘You’re wizards!’ Esk screamed. ‘Bloody well wizz!’
*
Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving an impression of a beginners’ ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VIII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well.
*
‘Million-to-one chances,’ Granny said, ‘crop up nine times out often.’
*
She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal.
*
But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.
*
‘I was born up in the mountains. I get seasick on damp grass, if you must know.’
*
‘You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say,’ [said Granny.]
Cutangle gave this some thought.
‘I think you’re wrong there,’ he said. ‘I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.’
‘Ah, but it wasn’t the same river.’
‘It wasn’t?’
‘No.’
Cutangle shrugged. ‘It looked like the same bloody river.’
*
… the endless rooftops of the University, which by comparison made Gormenghast look like a tool-shed on a railway allotment…
*
One thing the water couldn’t do was gurgle out of the ornamental gargoyles ranged around the roofs. This was because the gargoyles wandered off and sheltered in the attics at the first sign of rain. They held that just because you were ugly it didn’t mean you were stupid.
*
‘I don’t think there’s ever been a lady wizard before,’ said Cutangle. ‘I rather think it might be against the lore.’
DEATH comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job. After being assured that being dead was not compulsory, Mort accepted. However, he soon found out that romantic longings did not mix easily with the responsibilities of being Death’s apprentice…
Reannuals are plants that grow backwards in time. You sow the seeds this year and they grow last year.
A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.
*
Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful.
*
THANK YOU, BOY, said the skull. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
‘Uh,’ said Mort, ‘Mortimer … sir. They call me Mort.’