Your favourite Discworld Passage/Excerpt

Mark

It can be a line, it can be a page, lets hear that bit which shivered your testicles and burst your liver with laughter.

Im too tired to write out meh favourite favourite piece (Ill do it tomorrow), so I'll rely on the sig quote for now:

Only one creature could have duplicated the expressions on their faces, and that would be a pigeon who has heard not only that Lord Nelson has got down off his column but has also been seen buying a 12-bore repeater and a box of cartridges.[/

-Mort

banbutcher

he had explained that hygene was not just a greeting.

interesting times

Sarky

"Well, they starts out Maids of honour, but they ends up tarts.

Thanx 4 The Fish

Guards Guards

All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee.

Mort

Albert: "Sodomy non sapiens."
Mort: "What does that mean?"
Albert: "Means I'm buggered if I know."

Small Gods

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, "Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.

Interesting times

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time

Maskerade

Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.

My favourite of all though ....
The Last Continent
Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

Dar

Feet of clay:

It is a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn't blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Catling wasn't shot. If it hadn't been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumour would never have got started.

echomadman

From Mort

He looked at the boy with something verging on admiration. It wasn't that he'd drunk a third of a pint of scumble in itself, it was that he was still vertical and apparently alive.

and from The Fifth Elephant

Vimes: "There's still wars with trolls up near the Hub, I hear. Tact and diplomacy will be called for."
Detritus: "You have come to der right troll for dat, sir."
Vimes: "You did push that man through the wall last week, Detritus."
Detritus: "It was done with tact, sir. Quite a fin wall."

Dredz

From The Last Hero:

Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch.XXI, v.16) give 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 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 sof 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 - that pets are allowed.

heh.

bort

From Men at Arms:

The axiom 'Honest men have nothing to fear from the police' is currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board

and millions of others which i cant remember at this very moment

Havelock

He walked across the room to a stack of timber and thrust the scythe well out of the way behind the heap. There was a brief, punctured squeak.
Anyway, it would be all right. He'd give Bill his farthing back in the morning.

The Death of Rats materialised behind the heap in the forge, and trudged to the sad little heap of fur that had been a rat that got in the way of the scythe.
Its ghost was standing beside it, looking apprehensive. It didn't seem very pleased to see him.
'Squeak? Squeak?'
SQUEAK. the Death of Rats explained.
'Squeak?'
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats confirmed.
*[Preen whiskers] [twitch nose]?*
The Death of Rats shook its head.
SQUEAK.
The rat was crestfallen. The Death of Rats laid a bony but not entirely unkind paw on its shoulder.
SQUEAK.

Tile rat nodded sadly. It had been a good life in the forge. Ned's housekeeping was almost non-existent, and he was probably the world champion absent-minded-leaver of unfinished sandwiches. It shrugged, and trooped after the small robed figure. It wasn't as if it had any choice.

Sarky

"Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning he'd be the sort to stand on top of a hill in the middle of a thunderstorm in wet copper armour shouting 'All gods are bastards'. "

-Rincewind, on Twoflower.

The first part of The colour of magic to make me laugh out loud and try to explain it to everyone else.:D

MrNuked

"Buggy had tamed [the Heron] the usual gnome way; you painted yourself green like a frog and hung out in the marshes, croaking, and then when a heron tried to eat you, you ran up its beak and nutted it. By the time it came round you'd blown the special oil - that had taken all day to make, and the stink of it had emptied the Watch House - up its nostrils and it took one look at you and thought you were its mum."

Slutmonkey57b

From Feet of Clay

Vimes: "Incidentally, Sergeant, I've got a report here that a troll in uniform nailed one of Chrysoprase's henchmen to a wall by his ears last night. Know anything about that?"
Detritus: "Does it say anything 'bout him selling bags of Slab to troll kids?"
"No. It says he was going to read spiritual literature to his dear old mother."
"Did Hardcore say he saw dis troll's badge?"
"No but he says the troll threatened to ram it where the sun doesn't shine."
"Dat's a long way to go to ruin a good badge."
"By the way, that was a lucky guess of yours, guessing it was Hardcore."
"It come to me in a flash sir; I fort, what bas.tard who sells slab to kids deserves bein' nailed up by his ears, sir, and ... bingo."


And lots of Carrot stuff I can't remember.

And nothing at all by Granny Weatherwax.

Havelock

Its not discworld, but classic Pratchett.

"Thanks for the warning," Scarlett purred. Her voice sounded like something that lurks in the long
grass, visible only by the twitching of its ears, until something young and tender wobbles by.

Havelock

PS: That quote is from Good Omens
A great book

Pugsley

Sorry for reviving a dead thread etc etc, but just finished me 2nd Discworld book (im only starting), but this bit had me in stitchs, its from thief of time:

Lu-Tze, when they found him, was looking calmly up at an enourmous mammoth. Under its huge hairy brow its eye's were squinting with the effort of both seeing him and of getting all three brain cells lined up so that he could decide weather to trample him or gouge him out of the frost-bound landscape. One brain cell was saying 'gouge', one was going for 'trample', but the third had wandered off and was thinking about as much sex as possible

EdBanger

"Um Ankmorpork.........Er.. We have an Urangatan"

From the last Hero

Chowley

Im starting to think as I read this book yet again its his best.

I think these paragraphs say more about the faculty than any others, brilliant.

Bloody long but anyway its ****in great really.


Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them.The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly alright because, to be fair, so had the students.
The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no-one attended was an irrelevant detail. This was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not happen at all, but no-one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway it was argued (by the Reader in Wooly Thinking*) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was allright, too.
And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

*Which is like fuzzy logic, only less so.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The Chair of Indefinate Studies was giving a lecture in room 3B and therefore his presence asleep in front of the fire in the Uncommon was a technicality upon which no diplomatic man would comment.
Ridcully kicked him on the shins.
"Ow!"
"Sorry to interrupt, Chair", said Ridcully in a very perfunctory way."God help me, I need the council of wizards. Where is everybody?"
The Chair of Indefinate Studies rubbed his leg." I know the Lecturer in Recent Runes is giving a lecture in 3B,"*1 he said. "But I don't know where he is. You know, that really hurt --"
"Round everyone up.My study. Ten minutes, " said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until every-thng happened the way he wanted it to. *2

*1) All virtual lectures took place in room 3B, a room not locatable on any floor plan of the University and also, it was considered, infinite in size.

*2) A policy adopted by almost all managers and several notable gods.



UU kind of reminds me of Rochestown College in Cork strangely enough.

Capt'n Midnight

near the end when they are trying to convert the atheist.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

from The Last Hero

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 the 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 bloody 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, supersitions and ideas about how much better life would be if they had a bigger hunting ground.
Of the events of 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 another thing.'
They were then wiped out by a nearby tribe who knew that the lights 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 were in turn killed by a rock falling from the sky, as a result of a star exploding a billion years ago.
What goes around around comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.



i love that

Capt'n Midnight

"But the gods plainly do exist," said a priest.

"It Is Not Evident."

A bolt of lightning lanced through the clouds and hit Dorfl's helmet. There was a sheet of flame and then a trickling noise. Dorfl's molten armour formed puddles around his white-hot feet.

"I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument," said Dorfl calmly, from somewhere in the clouds of smoke.

* * *

And he's not just an atheist, he's a ceramic atheist! Fireproof!

http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/closet/pratchett/Feet-of-Clay.html

Capt'n Midnight

There was a roar like the scream of a camel who has just seen two bricks.

kanurocks

opening line of gaurds gaurds




;not many people noticed the librarian was an ape.


the first line i ever read in a disc world novel. i wanted my money back