And what had he wanted? He’d never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted yesterday to be different from today.
Words are the litmus paper of the mind.
This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.
No, what he didn’t like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship.
The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn’t actually exist at all.
These weren’t encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a longbow’s arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred yards away instead of the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.
You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away.
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.
It was quite impossible to describe. Here is what it looked like. It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and it felt Paisley. It smelled like the total eclipse of the moon.
People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.
Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.
But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.
Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity’s place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.
Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed any more.
Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.