#discworld

Silverfish looked down. "Oh. Are you a dwarf?" Cuddy gave him a blank stare. "Are you a giant?" He said. "Me? Of course not!" "Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#dwarf #perception #perspective #men

The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off. There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs. -Terry Pratchett sums up Discworld ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#fantasy #figurative-dragons #ideas #legend #men

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. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#humor #puns #equality

A dollar for a human bought a loaf of bread that was eaten in a few bites. The same dollar for Wee Mad Arthur bought the same-sized loaf, but it was food for a week and could then be further hollowed out ans used as a bedroom. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#feet-of-clay #wee-mad-arthur #food

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#bookstore #discworld #read #reading #read

A camel in distress isn’t a shy creature. It doesn’t hang around in bars, nursing a solitary drink. It doesn’t phone up old friends and sob at them. It doesn’t mope, or write long soulful poems about Life and how dreadful it is when seen from a bedsitter. It doesn’t know what angst is. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#discworld #humor #life

It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching? ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#humor #humour #teaching #humor

We're dealing here," said Vimes, "With a twisted mind." "Oh, no! You think so?" "Yes." "But... no... you can't be right. Because Nobby was with us all the time." "Not Nobby," said Vimes testily. "Whatever he might do to a dragon, I doubt if he'd make it explode. There's stranger people in this world than Corporal Nobbs, my lad." Carrot's expression slid into a rictus of intrigued horror. "Gosh," he said. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#arms #at #discworld #men #men

It was the way he wore the place. You expected him any moment to break into the kind of song that has suspicious rhymes and phrases like "my kind of town" and "I wanna be a part of it" in it; the kind of song where people dance in the street and give the singer apples and join in and a dozen lowly matchgirls suddenly show amazing choreographical ability and everyone acts like cheery lovable citizens instead of the murderous, evil-minded, self-centered people they suspect themselves to be. But the point was that if Carrot had erupted into a song, people WOULD have joined in. Carrot could have jollied up a circle of standing stones to form up behind him and do a rumba. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#song-lyrics #stereotypes #men

You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#discworld #morality-without-religion #the-individual #religion