The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

damn pink-and-white damn sickly damn stupid nougat!
    Well, no one could be expected to believe that counted. †

    The yeti of the Ramtops, where the Discworld’s magical field is so intense that it is part of the very landscape, are one of the few creatures to utilize control of personal time for genetic advantage. The result is a kind of physical premonition – you find out what is going to happen next by allowing it to happen. Faced with danger, or any kind of task that involves risk of death, a yeti will save its life up to that point and then proceed with all due caution, yet in the comfortable knowledge that, should everything go pancake-shaped, it will wake up at the point where it saved itself with, and this is the important part, knowledge of the events which have just happened but which will not now happen because it’s not going to be such a damn fool next time. This is not quite the paradox it appears because, after it has taken place, it hasn’t happened. All that actually remains is a memory in the yeti’s head, which merely turns out to be a remarkably accurate premonition. The little eddies in time caused by all this are just lost in the noise of all the kinks, dips and knots put in time by every other living creature.
    *
    Susan returned to the classroom and spent the rest of the day performing small miracles, which included removing the glue from Richenda’s hair, emptying the wee out of Billy’s shoes and treating the class to a short visit to the continent of Fourecks.

    † This is true. A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same branch of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking contains no calories.

 
    H E’S been a legend in his own lifetime.
    He can remember the great days of high adventure.
    He can remember when a hero didn’t have to worry about fences and lawyers and civilization.
    He can remember when people didn’t tell you off for killing dragons.
    But he can’t always remember, these days, where he put his teeth…
    He’s really not happy about that bit.
    So now, with his ancient sword and his new walking stick andMs old friends – and they’re very old friends – Cohen the Barbarian is going on one final quest. It’s been a good life. He’s going to Climb the highest mountain in the Discworld and meet his gods. He doesn’t like the way they let men grow old and die.
    It’s time, in fact, to give something back.
    The last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole. With a vengeance. That’ll mean the end of the world, if no one stops him in time.
    Someone is going to try. So who knows who the last hero really is?
    The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That’s the advantage of space. It’s big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.
    *
    People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.
    There’s nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. The fact that there’s a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere.
    *
    ‘Ah, well, life goes on,’ people say when someone dies. But from the point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn’t. It’s the universe that goes on. Just as the deceased was getting the hang of everything it’s all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the imponderables of life, in the face of which people either start to pray … or become really, really angry.
    *
    The wizards, once they understood the urgency of a problem, and then had lunch, and argued about the pudding, could actually work quite fast.
    Their method of finding a solution was by creative hubbub. If the question was, ‘What is the best spell for turning a book of poetry into a frog?’, then the one thing they would not do was look in any book with a title like Major Amphibian Spells in a Literary Environment: A Comparison. That would, somehow, be cheating. They would argue about it instead, standing around a blackboard, seizing the chalk from one another and rubbing out bits of what the current chalk-holder