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December 29, 2023 - January 10, 2024
It wasn’t that he was against anyone saving the world, or whatever subset of it apparently wanted saving. He just felt that it didn’t need saving by him.
There are times when it does not pay to declare one’s sanity, and Rincewind realized that he’d be mad to do so now.
the only one who ever said anything sensible said it in orangutan.
“Technically, not a single familiar constellation,”
Discworld constellations changed frequently as the world moved through the void, which meant that astrology was cutting-edge research rather than, as elsewhere, a clever way of avoiding a proper job.
except of course they hadn’t been given them by any god, lord knows, so what they really ought to do was exercise those brains developed over millennia in response to the external stimuli and the need to control those hands with their opposable thumbs, another damn good idea that he was very proud of. Or would have been, of course, if he existed.
The whole problem with evolution, he’d told himself, was that it wouldn’t obey orders. Sometimes, matter thinks for itself.
“we’ve searched everywhere for a decent library on this island. There simply isn’t one! It’s ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to get anything done?”
And he had no sense of humor. And he told jokes.
Ridcully told jokes like a bullfrog did accountancy. They never added up.
he noticed what looked like a very thick green hosepipe on the ground. “Hmm?” It was slightly transparent and seemed to be pulsating rhythmically. When he put his ear to it he heard a sound like gloop. Mildly deranged though he was, the Bursar had the true wizard’s instinct to amble aimlessly into dangerous places, so he followed the throbbing stem.
You can’t outrun your destiny, mate.” Rincewind didn’t even bother to argue. “You’re going to have to sort this out,” said Scrappy. “You’re the cause.” “I’m not! Things happen to me, not the other way around!”
Hovering immanently, the god cursed. He’d never intended the figurehead. Sometimes, he really wanted to just break down and cry.
it was a very proper item of clothing. But it looked as if it wasn’t. It was as if Mrs. Whitlow was wearing a figleaf six feet square. It was still just a figleaf.
It was green. And it bobbed up and down. It was clearly a ship, but built perhaps by someone who’d had a very detailed book of ship-building which nevertheless didn’t have any pictures in it. There was a blurriness of the detail. The figurehead, for example, was certainly vaguely female, although to the Dean’s disappointment it had the same detail as a half-sucked jellybaby.
“Begone from This Place Or I Will Smite Thee!” he commanded. “Why?” The god looked taken aback. “Why? You can’t ask why in this situation!” “Why not?” The god looked slightly panicky. “Because . . . Thou Must Go from This Place Lest I Visit Thee with Boils!” “Really? Most people would bring a bottle of wine,” said Ridcully. The god hesitated. “What?” he said. “Or cake,” said the Dean. “Cake is a good present if you’re visiting someone.” “It depends on what kind of cake,” said the Senior Wrangler. “Sponge cake, I’ve always thought, is a bit of an insult. Something with a bit of marzipan is to
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The problem faced by the god was that, while he had never encountered wizards before, the wizards had in their student days met, more or less on a weekly basis, things that threatened them horribly as a matter of course. Boils didn’t hold much of a menace when rogue demons had wanted to rip your head off and do terrible things down the hole.
Scale was always tricky in these matters. Being three feet high was not adding anything to his authority.
“Excuse me, sir, but exactly what kind of god are you?”
“All that smiting talk doesn’t really work, does it?” he said gloomily. “You don’t have to be nice about it. I could tell. I could give you boils, you understand, it’s just that I can’t really see the point. They clear up after a while, anyway. And it is rather bullying people, isn’t it? To tell you the truth, I’m something of an atheist.”
“I mean, I simply tried to appear in front of you in a form that you recognize as godly,” said the god. “A long beard and a nightshirt seem to be the thing, although the facial hair is a little puzzling.”
“I’m afraid I don’t get about as much as I should,” said the god sadly. “To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.” He heaved a big sigh and seemed to look even smaller. “Honest, I really do try but there are some days when life just gets me down . . . Oh, excuse me, liquid seems to be running out of my breathing tubes . . .”
The wizards drew closer. They were not, of course, afraid of gods, but gods tended to have uncertain tempers and a wise man kept away from them.
“Very hard thing to steer, lightning. Mostly we waited until a thunderbolt happened to hit some poor soul and then spake in a voice of thunder and said it was his fault for being a sinner. I mean, they were bound to have done something, weren’t they?”
“I really couldn’t see the point of the whole business, to tell you the truth. Shouting, smiting, getting angry all the time . . . don’t think anyone was getting anything out of it, really. But the worst part . . . You know the worst part? The worst part was that if you actually stopped the smiting, people wandered off and worshipped someone else. Hard to believe, isn’t it? They’d say things like, ‘Things were a lot better when there was more smiting,’ and, ‘If there was more smiting, it’d be a lot safer to walk the streets.’
“I mean, I tried. God knows I tried, and since that’s me, I know what I’m talking about. ‘Thou Shalt Lie Down Flat in Thundery Weather,’ I said. ‘Thou Shalt Site the Midden a Long Way from the Well,’ I said. I even told them, ‘Thou Shalt Really Try to Get Along with One Another.’
“I can’t say for sure. Everyone was slaughtered by the followers of the god in the next valley who told them to kill everyone who didn’t believe in him. Ghastly fellow, I’m afraid.”
“You know, it’s amazing what you get if you break even the common cow down into very small bits.” “Soup,” said Ridcully.
I thought it would be a much better idea to create creatures that could change their own instructions when they needed to,
Gods were often not good at humor, and this one was even worse than Ridcully.
Usually they defined “listening” as a period in which you worked out what you were going to say next.
There were times when the desire to climb the thaumaturgical ladder was seriously blunted, and one of them was when you saw what was on top.
And don’t look so upset. When it comes to gods, I have to say, you can give me one of the make-’em-out-of-clay-and-smite-’em brigade any day of the week. That’s the kind of god you can deal with.”
But there is something hugely unlovable about sheep, a kind of mad, eyerolling brainlessness smelling of damp wool and panic. Many religions extol the virtues of the meek, but Rincewind had never trusted them. The meek could turn very nasty at times.
trying and failing was probably a lot less of a crime than not trying at all.
The sheep wasn’t even trying to struggle. It was an old one, with fewer teeth than feet, and even in the very limited depths of its extremely shallow mind it knew that this wasn’t how shearing was supposed to go. Shearing was supposed to be a brief struggle followed by glorious cool freedom back in the paddock. It wasn’t supposed to include searching questions about what it thought of this weather or enquiries as to whether it required something for the weekend, especially since the sheep had no concept of the connotations of the term “weekend” or, if it came to that, of the word “something”
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“Clancy, we’re supposed to be carving a new language out of the wilderness here—”
Behind them, in the jumble of rocks and bushes at the end of the canyon, a drawing of a small horse became a drawing of a kangaroo and then faded into the stone.
The worst thing about losing your temper with Mustrum Ridcully was that he never noticed when you did.
When he was a boy, Ponder Stibbons had imagined that wizards would be powerful demi-gods able to change the whole world at the flick of a finger, and then he’d grown up and found that they were tiresome old men who worried about the state of their feet and, in harm’s way, would even bicker about the origin of the phrase “in harm’s way.”
The cover promised “hours of fun” although, after the first three minutes, you couldn’t help wondering what kind of person could make that kind of fun last for hours, and whether suffocating him as kindly as possible now would save the Serial Crimes Squad a lot of trouble in years to come.
“Dear me, the purpose of the whole business, you see, is in fact to be the whole business.
wouldn’t it be nice if you ended up with some creature that started to think about the universe—?”
Intelligence is like legs—too many and you trip yourself up.
they bite things and then say, ‘I wonder if this is poisonous,’ with their mouths full. And you know the really annoying thing? It never is.”
In Mrs. Whitlow’s book, gods were socially very acceptable, at least if they had proper human heads and wore clothes; they rated above High Priests and occupied the same level as Dukes.
“I’m not sure I actually approve of this,” said Ridcully, haughtily. “Gods and mortal women, you know. You hear stories.”
“That bit where he . . . and then she . . . Really, I’m amazed that anyone stops laughing long enough to . . . Still, I can see how it could work, and it certainly opens the door to some very interesting possibilities indeed
“You know, the more I think about it, the more I can see that ‘sex’ will solve practically all my problems.”
“I can’t help thinking, though, that we may have . . . tinkered with the past,
