Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind, #5)

by Terry Pratchett

Rincewind winced. He had always been aware that Someone Up There was doing something on him. He’d never considered it was smiling.

“I suppose . . . I could try to perform some great service?” said Rincewind, with the expression of one who knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

And he probably had saved the world a few times, but it had generally happened accidentally, while he was trying to do something else. So you almost certainly didn’t actually get any karmic points for that. It probably only counted if you started out by thinking in a loud way “By criminy, it’s jolly well time to save the world, and no two ways about it!” instead of “Oh, shit, this time I’m really going to die.”

“Great Wizard, ‘Noh’ is a non-realist symbolic form of theater employing archaic language, stylized gestures and an accompaniment of flutes and drums. Your pretence of stupidity is masterly. So much so that I could even believe that you are no actor.”

But when that sort of person started talking about things being more important than people, you knew you were in big trouble.

The Empire’s got something worse than whips all right. It’s got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.