Good Omens

by Terry Pratchett

‘You can’t second-guess ineffability, I always say.

The animals, freshly named,

(An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)

Professional Descendant)

Full Chorus of Tibetans, Aliens, Americans, Atlanteans and other rare and strange Creatures of the Last Days.

Dog (Satanical hellhound and cat-worrier)

if it were created at all and didn’t just start, as it were, unofficially,

because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.

The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven’t seen yet.

be compared, from the perspective of any of the other playersfn1, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Secondly, the Earth’s a Libra.

Olympic-grade lurkers.

with still enough sullen menace left for a final burst of lurking around dawn.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Watch out for that pedestrian!’ ‘It’s on the street, it knows the risks it’s taking!’

‘You’ll get us killed!’ Aziraphale hesitated. ‘Inconveniently discorporated,’

‘Just minor acts of ter— political protest,’ he corrected.

the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.

Daily Llama

If yer goin’ up against a tiger, ye don’t want fellow travellers whose idea of huntin’ is tae throw meat at it.

as well balanced as an upturned pyramid.

his Pensioner’s Concessionary Travel Pass. He believed in it. It powered him like a turbine.

liked to believe in a supreme God, although he’d have preferred a half-hour’s chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points.

if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent.

racist in such a glowering, undirected way that it was quite inoffensive;

There’s one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. It looked like someone had set fire to the sky.

combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.

warned you about not wearing a seatbelt even when you were; it had been programmed by someone who not only didn’t understand English, but didn’t understand Japanese either. It was state of the art, he said. The art in this case was probably pottery.

There’s a great big hole in the ozone layer ’cos of grass materialism people like you.’