The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

determines if it’s alive or not.’
    Death looked hurt. A RE YOU SUGGESTING I WILL KILL THE CAT JUST BY LOOKING AT IT?
    ‘It’s not quite like that, sir.’
    I MEAN, IT’S NOT AS IF I MAKE FACES OR ANYTHING.
    ‘To be honest with you, sir, I don’t think even the wizards understand the uncertainty business,’ said Albert.
    Death opened the box and took out the kitten. It stared at him with the normal mad amazement of kittens everywhere.
    I DON’T HOLD WITH CRUELTY TO CATS, said Death, putting it gently on the floor.

    ‘Some people say you achieve immortality through your children,’ said the minstrel.
    ‘Yeah?’ said Cohen. ‘Name one of your great-grandads, then.’

    Discworld briefly discovers space travel, and Carrot, Rincewind and Leonard of Quirm look down on the Disc from its moon:
    You know, I’m not sure I ever really believed it before,’ said Carrot. ‘You know … about the turtle and the elephants and everything. Seeing it all like this makes me feel very … very …’
    ‘Scared?’ suggested Rincewind.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Upset?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Easily intimidated?’
    ‘No.’
    Beyond the Rimfall, the continents of the world were coming into view under swirls of white cloud.
    You know .. . from up here … you can’t see the boundaries between nations,’ said Carrot, almost wistfully.
    ‘Is that a problem?’ said Leonard. ‘Possibly something could be done.’
    ‘Maybe huge, really huge buildings in lines, along the frontiers,’ said Rincewind. ‘Or … or very wide roads. You could paint them different colours to save confusion.’
    ‘Should aerial travel become widespread,’ said Leonard, ‘it would be a useful idea to grow forests in the shape of the name of the country, or of other areas of note. I will bear this in mind.’
    ‘I wasn’t actually sugges —’ Carrot began. And then he stopped, and just sighed.
    *
    On the veldt of Howondaland live the N’tuitif people, the only tribe in the world to have no imagination whatsoever.
    For example, their story about the thunder runs something like this: ‘Thunder is a loud noise in the sky, resulting from the disturbance of the air masses by the passage of lightning.’ And their legend ‘How the Giraffe Got His Long Neck’ runs: ‘In the old days the ancestors of Old Man Giraffe had slightly longer necks than other grassland creatures, and the access to the high leaves was so advantageous that it was mostly long-necked giraffes that survived, passing on the long neck in their blood just as a man might inherit his grandfather’s spear. Some say, however, that it is all a lot more complicated and this explanation only applies to the shorter neck of the okapi. And so it is.’
    The N’tuitif are a peaceful people, and have been hunted almost to extinction by neighbouring tribes, who have lots of imagination, and therefore plenty of gods, superstitions and ideas about how much better life would be if they had a bigger hunting ground.
    Of the events on the moon that day, the N’tuitif said: ‘The moon was brightly lit and from it rose another light which then split into three lights and faded. We do not know why this happened. It was just a thing.’
    They were then wiped out by a nearby tribe who knew that thelights had been a signal from the god Ukli to expand the hunting ground a bit more. However, they were soon defeated entirely by a tribe who knew that the lights were their ancestors, who lived in the moon, and who were urging them to kill all non-believers in the goddess Glipzo. Three years later they in turn were killed by a rock falling from the sky, as a result of a star exploding a billion years ago.
    What goes around, comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.
    *
    Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.16) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that the Heavenly Host and other essential services take up at least two thirds of this space, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for each human occupant – assuming that every creature that could be called ‘human’ is allowed in, and that the human race eventually totals a thousand times the number of humans alive up until now. This is such a generous amount of space that it suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races or – a happy thought –