Terry Pratchett

The Colour of Magic

Description of The Discworld

"`Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ``All gods are bastards''.'"
- Rincewind about Twoflower, the disc's first tourist

"Almost all of them had crude magic swords, whose unsurpressed harmonics on the astral plane played hell with any delicate experiments in applied sorcery for miles around, ..."
- Heroes

"The enormity of this lie was so great that its ripples did in fact spread out one of the lower astral planes as far as the Magical Quarter across the river, where it picked up tremendous velocity from the huge standing wave of power that always hovered there and bounced wildly across the Circle Sea."

"`Lightning is the spears hurled by the thunder giants when they fight [...] Established meteorological fact.'"
- the Picture Imp

"He [...] pulled out one of the flat packages.
It held biscuits that turned out to be as hard as diamond-wood.
`'loody 'ell,' he muttered, nursing his teeth.
`Captain Eightpanther's Travellers' Digestives, them,' said the imp from the doorway to his box. `Saved many a life at sea, they have.'
`Oh sure. Do you use them as a raft, or just throw them to the sharks and sort of watch them sink?'"
- Rincewind and the imp

"It had to be Death. No-one else went around with empty eye sockets and, of course, the scythe over one shoulder was another clue."
- Rincewind unexpectedly meets Death

"`Blast your luggage! Stay here much longer and you'll go where you don't need luggage!'"
- Rincewind

"The disc gods themselves, despite the splendour of the world below them, are seldom satisfied. It is embarrassing to know that one is a god of a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end;"

"Picturesque meant - he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word - that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant `idiot'."
- Rincewind and tourism

"He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used."
- Rincewind

"It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheist's houses and smashing their windows."

"Rincewind knew what was inside trees: wood, sap, possibly squirrels. Not a palace."

"Hrun was one of the Circle Sea's more durable heroes: a fighter of dragons, a despoiler of temples, a hired sword, the kingpost of every street brawl. He could even - and unlike many heroes of Rincewind's acquaintance - speak words of more than two syllables, if given time and maybe a hint or two."
- description of Hrun the Barbarian

"[...] a rather unpleasant glow that didn't so much illuminate as outline the darkness."
- inside the Temple of Bel-Shamharoth

"After the first Age of Magic the disposal of grimoires began to become a severe problem on the discworld. [...]
In short, spell books leak magic. Various solutions have been tried. Countries near the Rim simply loaded down the books of dead mages with leaden pentalphas and threw them over the Edge. Near the Hub less satisfactory alternatives were available. Inserting the offending books in canisters of negatively polarized octiron and sinking them in the fathomless depth of the sea was one (burial in deep caverns on land was earlier ruled out after some districts complained of walking trees and five-headed cats) but before long the magic seeped out and eventually fishermen complained of shoals of invisible fish or psychic clams."

"It was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out, picking scraps out of teeth."

"-- there was definitely less horizon than there ought to be."
- coming to the Edge of the world

"Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals, which were sown this year to come up later this year, biennials, sown this year to grow next year, and perennials, sown this year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could be planted this year to come up last year. The vul nut vine was particularly exceptional in that it could flourish as many as eight years prior to its seed actually being sown. Vul nut wine was reputed to give certain drinkers an insight into the future which was, from the nut's point of view, the past."

"They appeared to be made of fine white leather, hung about with straps and brass nozzles and other highly unfamiliar and suspicious contrivances. The leggings ended in high, thick-soled boots, and the arms were shoved into big supple gauntlets. Strangest of all were the big copper helmets that were obviously supposed to fit on heavy collars around the neck of the suits. The helmets were almost certainly useless for protection - a light sword would have no difficulty in splitting them, even if it didn't hit the ridiculous little glass windows in the front. Each helmet had a crest of white feathers on top, which went absolutely no way at all towards improving their overall appearance.
Rincewind was beginning to have the glimmerings of a suspicion about those suits.
In front of them was a table covered with celestial charts and scraps of parchment covered with figures. Whoever would be wearing those suits, Rincewind decided, was expecting to boldly go where no man - other than the occasional luckless sailor, who didn't really count - had boldly gone before, and he was now beginning to get not just a suspicion but a horrible premonition."
- space suits

" `Why must you always panic ?' asked Twoflower petulantly.
`Because the whole of my future life just flashed in front of my eyes, and it didn't take very long, [...].'"
- Rincewind panics