Pyramids (Discworld, #7)

by Terry Pratchett

But those first pyramids had been built by human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium, who had cut rocks into pieces and then painfully put them back together again in a better shape. They were old.

From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.

the gods of Disc have always been fascinated by humanity’s incredible ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. They’re not talking here of such easy errors as “It’s perfectly safe,” or “The ones that growl a lot don’t bite,” but of simple little sentences which are injected into difficult situations with the same general effect as a steel bar dropped into the bearings of a 3,000 rpm, 660 megawatt steam turbine.

“There you are, then. I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire.” Screams, flames, people running for safety . . .