The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

considerable annoyance to any Disc citizen with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell.
    *
    Trymon didn’t smile often enough, and he liked figures and the sort of organization charts that show lots of squares with arrows pointing to other squares. In short, he was the sort of man who could use the word ‘personnel’ and mean it.
    *
    ‘Do you think there’s anything to eat in this forest?’
    ‘Yes,’ said the wizard bitterly, ‘us.’
    *
    ‘[There are] some big mushrooms … Can you eat them?’
    Rincewind looked at them cautiously. ‘No, no good to eat at all.’
    ‘Why?’ called Twoflower. ‘Are the gills the wrong shade of yellow?’
    ‘No, not really …’
    ‘I expect the stems haven’t got the right kind of fluting, then.’
    ‘They look okay, actually.’
    ‘The cap, then, I expect the cap is the wrong colour,’ said Twoflower.
    ‘Not sure about that.’
    ‘Well then, why can’t you eat them?’
    Rincewind coughed. ‘It’s the little doors and windows,’ he said wretchedly, ‘it’s a dead giveaway’
    *
    He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.
    *
    ‘I said I hope it is a good party,’ said Galder, loudly.
    A T THE MOMENT IT IS , said Death levelly. I THINK IT MIGHT GO DOWNHILL VERY QUICKLY AT MIDNIGHT .
    ‘Why?’
    T HAT’S WHEN THEY THINK I’ LL BE TAKING MY MASK OFF .
    He vanished, leaving only a cocktail stick and a short paper streamer behind.
    *
    When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalized in generations of atlases such geographicaloddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
    *
    Cohen the Barbarian enters the Discworld canon:
    The barbarian chieftain said: ‘What then are the greatest things that a man may find in life?’
    The man on his right spoke thus: ‘The crisp horizon of the steppe, the wind in your hair, a fresh horse under you.’
    The man on his left said: ‘The cry of the white eagle in the heights, the fall of snow in the forest, a true arrow in your bow.’
    The chieftain nodded, and said: ‘Surely it is the sight of your enemy slain, the humiliation of his tribe and the lamentation of his women.’
    Then the chieftain turned respectfully to his guest, and said: ‘But our guest, whose name is legend, must tell us truly: what is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?’
    The warriors leaned closer. This should be worth hearing.
    The guest thought long and hard and then said, with deliberation: ‘Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.’
    *
    [He was] a very old man, the skinny variety that generally gets called ‘spry’, with a totally bald head, a beard almost down to his knees, and a pair of matchstick legs on which varicose veins had traced the street map of quite a large city …
    *
    ‘When I was a young man, carving my name in the world, well, then I liked my women red-haired and fiery’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘And then I grew a little older and for preference I looked for a woman with blonde hair and the glint of the world in her eye.’
    ‘Oh? Yes?’
    ‘But then I grew a little older again and I came to see the point of dark women of a sultry nature.’
    He paused. Rincewind waited.
    ‘And?’ he said. ‘Then what? What is it that you look for in a woman now?’
    Cohen turned one rheumy blue eye on him.
    ‘Patience,’ he said.
    *
    Cohen [had] .. . spent his life living rough under the sky [and] knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn’t find a pipe, a book was your man every time.
    Cohen realized people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.
    *
    ‘If you kill me a thousand will take my place,’ said the man, who was now backed against the wall.
    ‘Yes,’ said Cohen, in a reasonable tone of voice, ‘but that isn’t the point, is it? The point is, you’ll be