Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.
Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.
Occasionally he would very nearly swear.
Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.
The complete reverse was so often the case that he had come to think of it as a kind of natural law.
Steal five dollars and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.
One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.
The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.
I've seen excitement, and I've seen boredom. And boredom was best.
The demon coughed nervously. Demons do not breathe; however, every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life. And this was one of them as far as the demon was concerned.
The figure stopped to cough long and hard, making a noise like a wall being hit repeatedly with a bag of rocks. Moist saw that it had a beard of the short bristled type that suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.
One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.
Their families cordially detested one another.
The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.
If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander.
The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.
There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.
People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitely wicked.
We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.
Usually he didn't bother the gods, and he hoped the gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.
But…but you can't treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can't say yes please, I'll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.
Theres no stink more sorrorful than the stink of wet, burnt paper. It means: the end.
Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.
When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend.
There's no point in believing in things that exist.
It is embarrassing to know that one is a god of a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end; especially when one can peer into other dimensions at worlds whose Creators had more mechanical aptitude than imagination. No wonder, then, that the Disc gods spend more time in bickering than in omnicognizance.
You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that 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.
Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.
It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.
Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?
You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.
She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
Magic never dies. It merely fades away.
I commend my soul to any god that can find it.
You know how to pray, don't you? Just put your hands together and hope.
Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea.
Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.
We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.
No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.
I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it's so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories