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

by Terry Pratchett

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.

Somewhere in the world, he reasoned, there was someone who was on the other end of the seesaw, a kind of mirror Rincewind whose life was a succession of wonderful events. He hoped to meet him one day, preferably while holding some sort of weapon.

*People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events—the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there—that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.