
Pratchett Direct
You can use humor to get across a very serious idea.
I don’t think I’ve found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
Pratchett In Fiction
It is said that the opposite of noise is silence. This isn’t true. Silence is only the absence of noise.
Knurd is the opposite of being drunk, it’s as sober as you can ever be. It strips away all the illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then, after they’ve screamed a bit, they make sure they never get knurd again.
The opposite of ‘funny’ is not ‘serious; the opposite of ‘funny’ is ‘not funny.’
Life is… a problem because [we] think there are good people and bad people. [We’re] wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.
In a truly magical universe everything has its opposite. For example, there’s anti-light. That’s not the same as darkness, because darkness is merely the absence of light. Anti-light is what you get if you pass through darkness and out the other side.
There are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anticrime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage, humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on.
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