A few days back, I came across a thread on Mastodon where people were sharing great opening lines of books. I pitched in with the following opening lines from Discworld:
“THE SUN ROSE slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.” - from The Light Fantastic.
“THIS IS WHERE the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins.” - from Interesting Times.
So to all Discworld fans out here, pitch in with some Discworld quotes, be it starting lines or anything else. Or even just talk about your favourite books in the series. Let’s have some fun!
This is another one:
“I meant,” said Ipslore bitterly, “what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?”…
Death thought about it. “CATS” he said eventually. “CATS ARE NICE.”
-Terry Pratchett (Sourcery).
AND….
GNU PTERRY
“The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.”
GNU PTERRY
I love the long-running sentences that still make perfect sense like
“The Bursar hadn’t got where he was today, or rather where he had been ten seconds ago, which was where a calm and self-assured personality was, rather than where he was now, which was on the verge of a mild heart attack, without a tremendous ability to recover from unexpected upsets.”
-Moving Pictures
Or anything said by the witches
“Everywhere’s been where it is ever since it was first put there. It’s called geography.”
-Nanny Ogg, Wyrd Sisters
“I ATEN’T DEAD”
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.”
It just so happened that the person who introduced me to Discworld started me off on the Witches books, and given that I was about 13 at the time they were pretty formative years. As a result a decent chunk of my personality is based on a weird combo of the three, Granny Weatherwax in particular, and you’ll often find me ranting that I “don’t hold with” or “can’t be having with” something despite not in fact being an elderly Lancashire woman myself.
For some reason that quote from Wyrd Sisters is just the first one that I remember remembering, if that makes sense? Like the first one I would just quote in relevant situations as a teenager. It’s not super deep or special to me beyond that, but I’ll always remember it and those early days of discovering the series. Just super nostalgic.
The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.
