Pyramids (Discworld, #7)

by Terry Pratchett

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.

Mericet held his gaze for some time, but Teppic had practiced on the palace cats.

(Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.)

“Nil mortifi, sine lucre. Remember. No killing without payment.”

Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.

fiddly

“Our mum said his heart was in the right place,” said Gern. The king, hovering dismally in the corner, gave a gloomy nod. Yes, he thought. Jar three, top shelf.

sliders, rolling balls, dropping spears, arrows—”

human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium,

If it’s true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere.

As a result of this sort of thinking, the priests of the Djel could give mindroom to a collection of ideas that would make even a quantum mechanic give in and hand back his toolbox.

You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.

“The trouble with you, sibling, is that you know the cost of everything and the value of nothing!”

It’s not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.

It’s not generally realized that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human’s hand and eye coordination, a chameleon’s camouflage and a dolphin’s renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there’s

chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adve...

You Bastard. And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.

There was a notice on the dune. It said, in several languages: AXIOM TESTING STATION. Below it, in slightly smaller writing, it added: CAUTION-UNRESOLVED POSTULATES.

The gods of the Disc—and here is meant the great consensus gods, who really do exist in Dunmanifestin, their semi-detached Valhalla on the world’s impossibly high central mountain,

it was sound that winds itself up through the bones, creeps into every cell of the body, and tries with some success to turn them inside out. It was too loud to be called noise. There is sound so loud that it prevents itself from being heard, and this was that kind of sound.

It’s a mistake trying to cheer up camels. You may as well drop meringues into a black hole.