The Light Fantastic: (Discworld Novel 2) (Discworld series)

If the laws of action and reaction had anything to do with it, it should have flopped to the ground a few feet away. But no one was listening to them.

‘Look,’ said Rincewind urgently. ‘Druids are priests. You must remember that. Don’t do anything to upset them.’ ‘But—’ ‘Don’t offer to buy the stones.’ ‘But I—’ ‘Don’t start talking about quaint native folkways.’ ‘I thought—’ ‘Really don’t try to sell them insurance, that always upsets them.’ ‘But they’re priests!’ wailed Twoflower. Rincewind pause

On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.

(Rincewind had in any case seen his past life flash in front of his eyes so many times that he could sleep through the boring bits)

He may be deaf and a little hard of thinking, but elderly wizards have very well-trained survival instincts, and they know that when a tall figure in a black robe and the latest in agricultural handtools starts looking thoughtfully at you it is time to act fast.

Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it . . .

He read that its height plus its length divided by half its width equalled exactly 1.67563, or precisely 1,237.98712567 times the difference between the distance to the sun and the weight of a small orange.

For a man with an itch to see the whole of infinity, Twoflower never actually moved outside his own head.

The Death of the Disc was a traditionalist who prided himself on his personal service and spent most of the time being depressed because this was not appreciated. He would point out that no one feared death itself, just pain and separation and oblivion, and that it was quite unreasonable to take against someone just because he had empty eye-sockets