You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home. I think that’s what I mean.’

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.

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the kind of deliberate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life. It was the kind of sound that suggested very pointedly that in some hypotheti

The Luggage said nothing, but louder this time.

Rincewind had been generally reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers.

The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness. Thus it was that the sun and moon orbited the Disc because they were persuaded not to fall down, but didn’t actually fly away because of uncertainty. Charm allowed trees to grow and bloody-

Rincewind formed a mental picture of some strange entity living in a castle made of teeth. It was the kind of mental picture you tried to forget. Unsuccessfully.

THE SUN ROSE slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.