The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.
    *
    Any true wizard, faced with a sign like ‘Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We’re not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,’ would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about.
    *
    ‘Hah, I remember when I was a student,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Old “Bogeyboy” Swallett took us on an expedition to find the Lost Reading Room. Three weeks we were wandering around. Had to eat our own boots.’
    ‘Did you find it?’ said the Dean.
    ‘No, but we found the remains of the previous year’s expedition.’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘We ate their boots, too.’
    *
    ‘We’re a university! We have to have a library!’ said Ridcully ‘What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?’
    ‘Students,’ said the Senior Wrangler morosely.

    … a man whose ability to find water was limited to checking if his feet were wet…

    Ridcully was good at doing without other people’s sleep.
    *
    Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practicalmagic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn’t have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you’d started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.
    *
    Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Metres, the Mile, the Marathon - he’d run them all. Later, when he’d learned with some surprise what the word actually meant, he’d been equally certain he wasn’t one. He was a person who divided the world quite simply into people who were trying to kill him and people who weren’t.
    *
    ‘When you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy [said the Senior Wrangler], you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.’
    *
    Droit de mortis: broadly speaking, the acceleration of a wizard through the ranks of wizardry by killing off more senior wizards. It is a practice currently in abeyance, since a few enthusiastic attempts to remove Mustrum Ridcully resulted in one wizard being unable to hear properly for two weeks. Ridcully felt that there was indeed room at the top, and he was occupying all of it.
    *
    It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they’ve always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Caper). Sometimes a hammer and sickle turn up on the cover. This is probably caused by sunspot activity, since they are invariably the wrong way round.
    *
    Any seasoned traveller soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a ‘regional speciality’, because all the term means is that the dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than eat it. But hosts still press it upon distant guests anyway: ‘Go on, have the dog’s head stuffed with macerated cabbage and pork noses - it’s a regional speciality.’
    *
    The University’s housekeeper [it had been unkindly said] had a face full ofchins; there was a glossiness about her that put some people in mind of a candle that had been kept in the warm for too long. There wasn’t anything approaching a straight line anywhere on Mrs Whitlow, until she found that something hadn’t been dusted properly, when you could use her lips as a ruler.
    *
    The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame.
    *
    ‘Remember what we’d say in those days?’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘ “Never trust a wizard over