Dragons at Crumbling Castle And Other Stories

“Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant 'idiot'.”

“He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.”

“[He was] a very old man, the skinny variety that generally gets called ‘spry’, with a totally bald head, a beard almost down to his knees, and a pair of matchstick legs on which varicose veins had traced the street map of quite a large city ...”

“‘If you kill me a thousand will take my place,’ said the man, who was now backed against the wall. ‘Yes,’ said Cohen, in a reasonable tone of voice, ‘but that isn’t the point, is it? The point is, you’ll be dead.’”

“Twoflower didn’t just look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles, Rincewind knew – he looked at it through a rose-tinted brain, too, and heard it through rose-tinted ears.”

“There was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on as it turned a corner.”

“Then they all heard it; a tiny distant crunching, like something moving very quickly over the snow crust. ... It was louder now, a crisp rhythm like someone eating celery very fast.”

“Rincewind was to magic what a bicycle is to a bumblebee.”

“Trolls were not unknown in Ankh-Morpork, of course, where they often got employment as bodyguards. They tended to be a bit expensive to keep until they learned about doors and didn’t simply leave the house by walking aimlessly through the nearest wall.”

“There were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn’t take you seriously until you’d actually killed them, by which time it didn’t really matter anyway.”

“There have been bigger cities. There have been richer cities. There have certainly been prettier cities. But no city in the multiverse could rival Ankh-Morpork for its smell.”

“It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.”

“‘All the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Rincewind. ‘Luters, I expect.’”

“The Discworld is as round and flat as a geological pizza, although without the anchovies.”

“He came walking through the thunderstorm and you could tell he was a wizard, partly because of the long cloak and carven staff but mainly because the raindrops were stopping several feet from his head, and steaming.”

“The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked like, or even if there had ever been one.”

“Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.”

“‘Hoki’s a nature god,’ Granny said. ‘Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance.’”

“A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for you).”

“No one can out-stare a witch, ’cept a goat, of course.”