The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

was?’
    ‘That winter just then.’
    ‘Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters—’
    Then the tree vanished.
    After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: ‘He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!’
    Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.
    *
    Death’s pale horse’s name was Binky He was a real horse. Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed.

    Killing off a wizard of a higher grade was a recognized way of getting advancement in the orders.

    Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, ‘O great table, without whom we are as naught’. Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or they exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
    *
    The Bursar … didn’t eat much, but lived on his nerves. He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.
    *
    Mustrum Ridcully was, depending on your point of view, either the worst or the best Archchancellor that Unseen University had had for a hundred years.
    There was too much of him, for one thing. It wasn’t that he was particularly big, it was just that he had the kind of huge personality that fits any available space. He’d get roaring drunk at supper and that was fine and acceptable wizardly behaviour. But then he’d go back to his room and play darts all night and leave at five in the morning to go duck hunting. He shouted at people. He tried to jolly them along. And he hardly ever wore proper robes. He’d persuaded Mrs Whitlow, the University’s dreaded housekeeper, to make him a sort of baggy trouser suit in garish blue and red; twice a day the wizards stood in bemusement and watched him jog purposefully around the University buildings, his pointy wizarding hat tied firmly on his head with string. He’d shout cheerfully up at them, because fundamental to the make-up of people like Mustrum Ridcully is an iron belief that everyone else would like it, too, if only they tried it.
    *
    Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever, changed his mind about anything. The other was that it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.
    *
    Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on.
    *
    For more than a century Windle Poons had lived inside the walls of Unseen University. In terms ofaccumulated years, he may have lived a long time. In terms of experience, he was about thirteen.
    *
    The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork The Shades would be represented by a shaft.
    *
    ‘If anyone’s going to bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we’re his