Things

99 notes

But you read a lot of books, I’m thinking. Hard to have faith, ain’t it, when you’ve read too many books?

27 notes

I’m fed up with you smarming at me smarmily as if you were Mister Smarm!

22 notes

There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one—according to itself—the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. As Didactylos used to say, you had to laugh.

23 notes

Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.

People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man.

Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-and-lightening opera scores.

In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe… well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes.

71 notes

And then Jack chopped down what was the world’s last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant’s children didn’t have a daddy any more. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you’re a hero, because no-one asks inconvenient questions.

30 notes

[Rincewind] tried to remember what little he knew of classical history, but it was just a confusion of battles, one-eyed giants and women launching thousands of ships with their faces.