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Everyday took an age to go by, which was odd, because days plural went past like a stampede.
Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever, changed his mind about anything. The other was that it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.
The University gates were always locked at sunset every evening, obliging students and staff to climb over the walls.
“I suppose there’s not some kind of magic you don’t know about?” “If there is, we don’t know about it.” “Fair enough,” the priest conceded.
Somewhere in his tiny mad chicken mind a very distinct and chilly understanding formed that he’d better learn to read very, very quickly.
Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason.
NOT USUALLY. SOMETIMES PEOPLE CHALLENGE ME TO A GAME. FOR THEIR LIVES, YOU KNOW. “Do they ever win?” NO. LAST YEAR SOMEONE GOT THREE STREETS AND ALL THE UTILITIES. “What? What sort of game is that?” I DON’T RECALL. “EXCLUSION POSSESSION,” I THINK. I WAS THE BOOT.
“It can’t be intelligent, can it?” said the Bursar. “All it’s doing is moving around slowly and eating things,” said the Dean. “Put a pointy hat on it and it’d be a faculty member,” said the Archchancellor.
REMEMBER: YOU ARE IN NO DANGER. Bill Door stepped back into the gloom. Then he reappeared momentarily. PROBABLY, he added, and retreated into the darkness.
Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn’t mean stupid. It just meant that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges.
“Oook!” said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded up remains of, for example, the Dean.
In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?
But they’re not, precisely, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.
Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out . . .
And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.
