The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

no one knew. But if he didn’t actually invent original sin, at least he made one of the first copies.
    *
    Rincewind looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best.
    The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It.
    Eric was standing on: For The Sake Of The Children.
    ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Why do it like this?’
    ‘I think they’re meant to be good intentions,’ said Rincewind. This was a road to hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists.

    Old Tom was the single cracked bronze bell in the University bell tower.
    The clapper dropped out shortly after it was cast, but the bell still tolled out some tremendously sonorous silences every hour.

 
    T HE alchemists of the Discworld have discovered the magic of the silver screen. But wheat is the dark secret of Holy Wood kill?
    It’s tip to Victor Tugelbend (‘Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can handle a sword a little’) and Theda Withel (‘I come from a little town you’ve probably never heard of) to find out…
    This is space. It’s sometimes called the final frontier.
    (Except that of course you can’t have & final frontier, because there’d be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it’s pretty penultimate …)
    *
    The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist.
    *
    There’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
    And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

    Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So freshthe pig hasn’t noticed they’re gone!

    Unseen University had had many different kinds of Archchancellor over the years. Big ones, small ones, cunning ones, slightly insane ones, extremely insane ones - they’d come, they’d served, in some cases not long enough for anyone to be able to complete the official painting to be hung in the Great Hall, and they’d died. The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
    *
    The name might change occasionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor …
    At the time, it had seemed a really good idea to elect an Archchancellor who hadn’t set foot in the University in forty years. A search of the records turned up Ridcully the Brown. He looked ideal …
    A messenger had been sent. Ridcully the Brown had sighed, cursed a bit, found his staff in the kitchen garden where it had been supporting a scarecrow, and had set out.
    Within twelve hours of arriving, Ridcully had installed a pack of hunting dragons in the butlers’ pantry, fired his dreadful crossbow at the ravens on the ancient Tower of Art, drunk a dozen bottles of red wine, and rolled off to bed at two in the morning singing a song with words in it that some of the older and more forgetful wizards had to look up.
    And then he got up at five o’clock to go duck hunting down in the marshes on the estuary.
    And came back complaining that there wasn’t a good trout fishin’ river for miles. (You couldn’t fish in the river Ankh; you had to jump up and down on the hooks even to make them sink.)
    And he ordered beer with his breakfast.
    And told jokes.
    On the other hand, at least he didn’t interfere with the actual running of the University. Ridcully the Brown wasn’t the least interested in running anything except maybe a string of hounds. If you couldn’t shoot arrows at it, hunt it or hook it, he couldn’t see much point in it.
    *
    A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.

    The Alchemists’ Guildhall was new. It was always new.
    It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a helpful move.

    By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.
    *
    The Patrician’s stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.
    *
    ‘Well, what you do is, you take some corn, and you put it in, say, a Number 3 crucible, with some cooking