Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California. …there’s a perfectly ordinary English sentence. How did that happen! You know how that happened? ‘Cause I’ll tell you. You know how we got into that position? He got there - by lifting things. Now you and me, we avoid lifting things. It’s unpleasant. Especially heavy things. Even a five-year-old child knows this. […] You know, you lift something when you have to. Piano falls on Granny, you lift the piano. ‘Cause Granny has mixed feelings about the whole situation. Sunday lunch continues. He didn’t do any of that! He went right over to the heavy thing and lifted it and put it back down and didn’t move it anywhere. And then he lifted it again, hundreds of times. And said, to the people who had stopped to observe this abhorrent behaviour: “Look how good I am, at lifting the heavy thing. In my underpants.” Now *that* sounds a little dim. But it was *they* who said: “You are the man. You’re the one we want to deal with immigration and water rates and taxes and all that kind of shit.”

A: How many people with ADD does it take to change a light-bulb?
B: I don’t know? How many?
A: Want to go to the movies?

Belonging to a party like Democratic or Republican is awesome. Usually when you give yourself a label you actually have to *do* something. If you only took a one-hour jog every four years you couldn’t call yourself a runner.

What do you know about your potential, anyway. Leave it alone. Don’t touch it, you’ll fuck it up. It’s potential, don’t go near it! […] You don’t wanna know that you have fuck-all potential. That the most you could do if you gave it everything, if you gave it every single screed of energy within you, if you harvested every iota of will that you possess, that the *most* you could achieve would be to maybe - *maybe* - eat less cheesy snacks.

“Let me get this straight,” one student said. “You’re telling me that if I say something out loud, it’s me saying it, but if I write the exact same thing on paper, it’s somebody else, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And we’re calling that fiction.”

The student pulled out his notebook, wrote something down, and handed me a sheet of paper that read, “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard in my life.”

They were a smart group.

Friendship is like peeing in your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel the warmth.

Vincent van Gogh war ein holländischer Maler
Er schnitt sich ab sein linkes Ohr
Das kommt bei Künstlern manchmal vor
Wären alle wie van Gogh
Dann hätten wir ein großes Loch
In der Mitte der Gesellschaft
Dann hätten alle nur ein Ohr
Dann wären alle im Radio
Und keiner säße mehr davor.

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.

It would be a cold day in hell before I bought Nora a bride costume. It does not even make much sense as a costume, as bride-dom is a temporary state of being and I can’t think of many other costumes that go that route. It would be like dressing as a freshman, or as someone who has a cold.

- My uncle won’t come in.
- Your uncle… Oh, right. Why? Doesn’t like doctors?
- He doesn’t trust them.
- Why’s that?
- He *is* a doctor.
- Oh really? Which kind?
- Witch.
- Which which?
- Which what?
- Which doctor.
- Right.

[about the HHGG radio series] I think that the BBC’s attitude toward the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering people—initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight.

We live in strange times.
We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, ‘Oh, hi Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?’ involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your kid a break, OK?

(Extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally Demented Universe)

[on homosexuality] You can’t talk people in and out of that stuff. You just are what you are. Your mind can be changed. Your heart can be swayed. Your … penis is very stubborn.

I opened up a container of yogurt, and under the lid it said “Please Try Again” because they were having a contest I was unaware of. But I thought I might have opened the yogurt wrong, or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. “C’mon, Mitchell, don’t give up. Please try again. A message of inspiration from your friends at Yoplait. Fruit on the bottom, hope on top.”

I like you. You’re funny and you’re nicely shaped, and frankly it’s ludicrous to have these interlocking bodies and not interlock. Please remove your clothing now.

* In fact it’s the view of the more thoughtful historians, particularly those who have spent time in the same bar as the theoretical physicists, that the entirety of human history can be considered as a sort of blooper reel. All those wars, all those famines caused by malign stupidity, all that determined, mindless repetition of the same old errors, are in the great cosmic scheme of things only equivalent to Mr Spock’s ears falling off.

Ridcully pointed to a little wooden device by the door. There was one outside every wizard’s study. It consisted of a little sliding panel in a frame. Currently it was revealing the word ‘IN’ and, presumably, was covering the word ‘OUT’, although you could never be sure with some wizards.*



* The Lecturer in Creative Uncertainty, for example, held rather smugly that he was in a state of both in-ness and outness until such time as anyone knocked on his door and collapsed the field, and that it was impossible to be categorical before that event. Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn’t always beat actual thought.

Such a proud moment of professionalism. You work for years crafting cogent satirical essays and the thing that everybody remembers is me making love to a Chiquita and bursting into laughter. What you can’t see off camera is Jon started laughing first. And then I’m weak. As much as I want to make the audience laugh, I really want to make Jon laugh.

Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthusiastic amateur who’d never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man looks at and says, ‘No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.’
Nevertheless, it was beautiful.*



* But not tasteful.

In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly:
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?”
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.

Death walked up to a table that had been laid for dinner, and gripped a corner of the tablecloth.
TIME IS THE CLOTH, he said. THE CUTLERY AND PLATES ARE THE EVENTS THAT TAKE PLACE WITHIN TIME–
There was a drum roll. Susan glanced down. The Death of Rats was seated in front of a tiny drum kit.
OBSERVE.
Death pulled the cloth away. There was a rattle of cutlery and a moment of uncertainty regarding a vase of flowers, but almost all the tableware remained in place.
‘I see,’ said Susan.
THE TABLE REMAINS LAID, BUT THE CLOTH CAN NOW BE USED FOR ANOTHER MEAL.
‘However, you knocked the salt over,’ said Susan.
THE TECHNIQUE IS NOT PERFECT.
‘And there are stains on the cloth from the previous meal, Grandfather.’
Death beamed. YES, he said. AS METAPHORS GO IT IS RATHER GOOD, DON’T YOU THINK?
‘People would notice!’
REALLY? HUMANS ARE THE MOST UNOBSERVANT CREATURES IN THE UNIVERSE. OH, THERE ARE LOTS OF ANOMALIES, OF COURSE, A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF SPILLED SALT, BUT HISTORIANS EXPLAIN THEM AWAY. THEY ARE SO VERY USEFUL IN THAT RESPECT.

The singers were halfway down Park Lane now, and halfway through ‘The Red Rosy
Hen’ in marvellous harmony.*



* ‘The red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day’. In fact the hen is not the bird traditionally associated with heralding a new sunrise, but Mrs Huggs, while collecting many old folk songs for posterity, has taken care to rewrite them where necessary to avoid, as she put it, ‘offending those of a refined disposition with unwarranted coarseness’. Much to her surprise, people often couldn’t spot the unwarranted coarseness until it had been pointed out to them.
Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird.

It’s amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters. One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it. It’s not known why most of the spacegoing races of the universe want to undertake rummaging in Earthling underwear as a prelude to formal contact. But representatives of several hundred races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be abductees. Some have been in fact abducted while waiting to carry out an abduction on a couple of other aliens trying to abduct the aliens who were, as a result of misunderstood instructions, trying to form cattle into circles and mutilate crops. The planet Earth is now banned to all alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they have actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one who is big, hairy and has very large feet. The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles. The Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with words like ‘Cosmic’ and ‘Chaos’ in the titles.*
The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a ‘Fill in name here’ nature, secretly believes to be true.


* And they are correct. The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.

I wouldn’t say ‘the glass is half-empty’.
I wouldn’t say ‘the glass is half-full’.
I might say ‘the glass contains 284ml’. If it’s a pint pot.
Engineers, eh?

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?” When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, “We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…”

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Money smells like feet. Feet get us from where we are standing to other places so that we can stand there. I know what you are thinking…so do bicycles, but even then YOU NEED FEET.

Bach is MATH, dude. Bach is RESTRAINED. Bach never meant for you to get all Israeli and passionate and bombastic on his ass.

‘Life in this world,’ he said, ‘is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say humbly, “Go on, do Deformed Rabbit… it’s my favourite.”’

Love is just a simple-minded little euphemism for a grab-bag of primitive sexual impulses, unrelenting neediness, neurotic anxiety, and brain-squeezing social pressure. You’re pushed to couple with your so-called soulmate with all the poetry and rapture of two sea slugs encountering each other on the bottom of the ocean.

FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC. [motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch]

Space is limited
In a haiku, so it’s hard
To finish what you

[Didactylos’] philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools — the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans — and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, “You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.”

What’s another word for Thesaurus?