Terry Pratchett

The Light Fantastic

"Picture it as a diving suit designed by men who have never seen the sea."
- a spacesuit made on the Disc

"There was something very strange about this room deep in the cellars of Unseen University, the Disc's premier college of magic. For one thing it seemed to have too many dimensions, not exactly visible, just hovering out of eyeshot. The walls were covered with occult symbols, and most of the floor was take up by the Eightfold Seal of Stasis, generally agreed in magical circles to have all the stopping power of a well-aimed halfbrick."
- the room of the Octavo

"There are of course many famous books of magic. [...]; some may recall that the Bumper Fun Grimoire reputedly contains the one original joke left in the universe."

"There was no mistaking it. It was the universe.
He was quite sure of this, because he had a model of it in his study and it was generally agreed to be far more impressive than the real thing."

"The Disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailors who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world."

"Some people, thought Galder grimly, would have had the decency to put an exclamation mark on the end of a statement like that."

"In fact the Gods were as puzzled by all this as the wizards were, but they were powerless to do anything and in any case were engaged in an eons-old battle with the Ice Giants, who had refused to return the lawnmower."

"No-one knew what would happen if one of the Eight Great Spells was said by itself, but the general agreement was that the best place from which to watch the effects would be the next universe."

"Rincewind was a city wizard and, although he was aware that there were various differences among types of tree by which their nearest and dearest could tell them apart, the only thing he knew for certain was that the end without the leaves on fitted into the ground. There were far too many of them, arranged with absolutely no sense of order."

"Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly."

"The daylight was draining out of the landscape and the clouds looked as if they had heard about snow and were considering the idea."

"He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk."
- Trymon's reaction on a magical accident

A discussion about stars and the effects of a collision with the Disc
- the Professor of Astrology and Trymon

"[...] life on the open steppe makes you realise how neatly the sky fits the land all around the edges and this naturally inspires the mind to deep thoughts like `Why?', `When?' and `Why don't we try beef for a change?'"
- the Horse Tribes of the Hubland and natural magic

"`Why does everyone look at me?' he said. `I don't know what it is, maybe it's a comet or something.'
`Will we all be burned up?' said Bethan.
`How should I know? I've never been hit by a comet before.'"
- Rincewind

"The Disc's little moon toiled across the sky. It shone by its own light, owing to the cramped and rather inefficient astronomical arrangements made by the Creator, and was quite crowded with assorted lunar goddesses who were not, at this particular time, paying much attention to what went on in the Disc but were getting up a petition about the Ice Giants."

"Trolls are one of the oldest lifeforms in the multiverse, dating from an early attempt to get the whole life thing on the road without all that squashy protoplasm."

"`We're a dying race,' said Kwartz sadly, as the party set off under the stars. `Young Jasper's the only pebble in our tribe. We suffer from philosophy, you know.'"
- trolls

"The jeweller had produced a very large and dirty axe, guaranteed to add tetanus to all the other terrors of warfare."

"There have been three general theories put forward to explain the phenomenon of the wandering shops or, as they are generically known, tabernae vagantes.
The first postulates that many thousands of years ago there evolved somewhere in the multiverse a race whose single talent was to buy cheap and sell dear. Soon they controlled a vast galactic empire or, as they put it, Emporium, and the more advanced members of the species found a way to equip their very shops with unique propulsion units that could break the dark walls of space itself and open up vast new markets. And long after the worlds of the Emporium perished in the heat death of their particular universe, after one last defiant fire sale, the wandering star shops still ply their trade, eating their way through the pages of spacetime like a worm through a three-volume novel.
The second is that they are the creation of a sympathetic Fate, charged with the role of supplying exactly the right thing at the right time.
The third is that they are simply a very clever way of getting around the various Sunday Closing acts.
All these theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They explain the observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong."