A few days back, I came across a thread on Mastodon where people were sharing great opening lines of books. I pitched in with the following opening lines from Discworld:
“THE SUN ROSE slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.” - from The Light Fantastic.
“THIS IS WHERE the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins.” - from Interesting Times.
So to all Discworld fans out here, pitch in with some Discworld quotes, be it starting lines or anything else. Or even just talk about your favourite books in the series. Let’s have some fun!
This is another one:
“I meant,” said Ipslore bitterly, “what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?”…
Death thought about it. “CATS” he said eventually. “CATS ARE NICE.”
-Terry Pratchett (Sourcery).
AND….
GNU PTERRY
“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
“REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.”
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
“YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.”
“So we can believe the big ones?”
“YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.”
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET - Death waved a hand - “AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.”
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
“MY POINT EXACTLY.”
Oh I loved it! DEATH is one of my favourite characters.
He heard the muffled sounds coming from the nearby alley, slid his leather-bound cosh from his sleeve, waited until the victim was almost turning the corner, sprang out, said “Oh, shi—” and died.
It was a most unusual death. No one else had died like that for hundreds of years.
–Guards! Guards!
Removed by mod
it was some years ago when I read discworld in polish fan-translation so quote might be inaccurate.
“IT WILL GET WORSE AFTER MIDNIGHT”
(“O PÓŁNOCY SIĘ POGORSZY”)still lives rent free in my head
Bloody Stupid Johnson. Just the whole of him.
He’s so impossibly stupid he wraps back around to being genius. I always look forward to seeing what impossible inventions is inserted in each book, and filled with immense disappointment if he doesn’t make even a reference.
Removed by mod
“Thunder rolled. […] It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are - who knows?
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled…
It rolled a six.”
From one of the Night Guards trilogy, unfortunately I did not write down which one.
One of my two favourite quotes. From “Unseen Academicals” by Lord Vetinari.
"The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
The second is Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Oh yes, Sam Vimes “Boots” theory. Also my favourite.
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that -”
"No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
I absolutely love this one!
