Friday Quotations: Bonk is a small village in Uberwald.

I might have actually used this one before, and it's fairly long, but it's stuck with me for years, so it bears repeating. From the opening of Terry Pratchett's Thud!:

"The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
"The second thing Tak did, he wrote the Laws.
"The third thing Tak did, he wrote the World.
"The fourth thing Tak did, he wrote a cave.
"The fifth thing Tak did, he wrote a geode, an egg of stone.

"And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched and the Brothers were born.
"The first Brother walked towards the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no Laws, and he was enlightened.
"The second Brother walked towards the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened.
"But some of the living spirit of Tak was trapped in the broken stone egg, and it became the first troll, wandering the world unbidden and unwanted, without soul orpurpose, learning or understanding. Fearful of light and darkness it shambles for ever in twilight, knowing nothing, learning nothing, creating nothing, being nothing...
"--From 'Gd Tak 'Gar' (The Things Tak Wrote) trans. Prof. W. W. W. Wildblood, Unseen University Press, AM$8. In the original, the last paragraph of the quoted text appears to have been added by a much later hand."

I still roll my eyes a bit on the "endarkened" part, but the overall passage is great; it really establishes the prejudice between the dwarfs and the trolls, which is the main subject for this particular book.

Later Days.