Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1)

by Terry Pratchett

The storm walked around the hills on legs of lightning, shouting and grumbling.

If you invited a hedge wizard to a party he would spend half the evening talking to your potted plant. And he would spend the other half listening.

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

Spiders ran desperate eight-legged dashes for safety as ancestral cobwebs disappeared into the void.

“Everyone try and reach out,” said Cutangle, and choked down a scream as a hand like a warm leather glove closed around his ankle. There was a satisfied little “ook,” which managed to convey relief, comfort and the sheer joy of touching a fellow human being or, in this case, anthropoid.