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People don’t live on the Disc any more than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls. Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the centre of their heads.
People believe in all sorts of other things, though. For example, there are some people who have a legend that the whole universe is carried in a leather bag by an old man. They’re right, too. Other people say: hold on, if he’s carrying the entire universe in a sack, right, that means he’s carrying himself and the sack inside the sack, because the universe contains everything. Including him. And the sack, of course. Which contains him and the sack already. As it were.
Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly heavy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges. Research wizards have speculated that there is another, much speedier type of light which allows the slower light to be seen, but since this moves too fast to see they have been unable to find a use for it.
They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don’t have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past.
Wasn’t it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?
Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.
Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly.
‘He called me in and asked me what I did, exactly. Have you ever heard of such a thing? What sort of question is that? This is a university!’
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Metres, the Mile, the Marathon – he’d run them all.
Creators aren’t gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It’s men that make gods. This explains a lot.
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. It was amazing how human traits and affairs could so reliably and continuously be guided by a succession of big balls of plasma billions of miles away, most of whom have never even heard of humanity.
And that was the other side of the odd thing about wizards. While they were quite capable of spending half an hour arguing that it could not possibly be Tuesday, they’d take the outrageous in their pointy-shoed stride.
And he was pretty sure that there was no way you could get a cross between a human and a sheep. If there was, people would definitely have found out by now, especially in the more isolated rural districts.
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.
To tell you the truth, I’m something of an atheist.’ ‘Sorry?’ said Ridcully. ‘You are an atheist god?’ The god looked at their expressions. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a bottomer, isn’t it?’
It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego.
A flash of inspiration struck him with all the force and brilliance that ideas have when they’re travelling through beer.
‘We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘It saves time.’
