Make Me Laugh?
Quotes from Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time."
One of life's certainties is that there is generally a last chocolate hidden in all those empty wrappers.
Death found Pestilence in a hospice in Llamedos. Pestilence like hospitals. There was always something for him to do. Currently he was trying to remove the "Now Wash Your Hands" sign over a cracked basin. "Soap? I'll give 'em soap!"
I've never liked philosophers. They make it all sound so grand and simple, and then you step out into a world that's full of complications.
IT HAS BEEN RATHER PEACEFUL OF LATE, I AGREE, said Death.
"Peaceful?" Said War. "Ha! I may as well change m'name to 'Police Action' or 'Negotiated Settlement'! Remember the old days? Warriors used to froth at the mouth! Arms and legs bouncing in all directions! Great time, eh?" He leaned across and slapped Death on the back. "I'll bag 'em and you'll tag'em, what?"
This looked hopeful, Death thought.
Age and wisdom don't necessarily go together. Some people just become stupid with more authority.
A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same brand of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking along contains no calories.
The yeti of the Ramtops, are one of the few creatures to utilize control of personal time for a 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 happen now because it's not going to be such a damn fool next time.
People have been messing around with time ever since they were people. Wasting it, killing it, sparing it, making it up. And they do it. People's heads were made to play with time. You watch the Procrastinators even on a quiet day. Moving time, stretching it here, compressing it there; it's a big job.
You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. ... Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think 'oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?"
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.
Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it.
Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.
One of life's certainties is that there is generally a last chocolate hidden in all those empty wrappers.
Death found Pestilence in a hospice in Llamedos. Pestilence like hospitals. There was always something for him to do. Currently he was trying to remove the "Now Wash Your Hands" sign over a cracked basin. "Soap? I'll give 'em soap!"
I've never liked philosophers. They make it all sound so grand and simple, and then you step out into a world that's full of complications.
IT HAS BEEN RATHER PEACEFUL OF LATE, I AGREE, said Death.
"Peaceful?" Said War. "Ha! I may as well change m'name to 'Police Action' or 'Negotiated Settlement'! Remember the old days? Warriors used to froth at the mouth! Arms and legs bouncing in all directions! Great time, eh?" He leaned across and slapped Death on the back. "I'll bag 'em and you'll tag'em, what?"
This looked hopeful, Death thought.
Age and wisdom don't necessarily go together. Some people just become stupid with more authority.
A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same brand of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking along contains no calories.
The yeti of the Ramtops, are one of the few creatures to utilize control of personal time for a 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 happen now because it's not going to be such a damn fool next time.
People have been messing around with time ever since they were people. Wasting it, killing it, sparing it, making it up. And they do it. People's heads were made to play with time. You watch the Procrastinators even on a quiet day. Moving time, stretching it here, compressing it there; it's a big job.
You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. ... Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think 'oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?"
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.
Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it.
Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.
posted by Anemone Flynn | 1/31/2006 02:47:00 PM
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