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roddy-bg My name is Radostina Georgieva, "Roddy".
I live in California.
I enjoy travelling, reading books, listening to music, going to the movies.
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"Lu-Tze travels to Omnia to be witness to great events the novice Brutha in the Church of Om is visited by the God Om in the form of a tortoise. Om is down to just one true believer, Brutha, and needs to gain more in order to survive even as a minor deity. Unfortunately Brutha comes to the attention of Vorbis, head of the Quisition, and embroiled in the plans to invade and convert Ephebe and neighboring countries. Can Brutha survive the machinations of Vorbis and deal with the hourly blasphemies of the God?"
"Terry Pratchet" by Andrew M Butler

Targets
Organized religion, in particular the Catholic Church and the Inquisition.

For a very few, the sky's the limit.
And, sometimes, not even that.

***

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

***

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

***

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

***

"Yes, but humans are more important than animals," said Brutha.
"This is a point of view often expressed by humans," said Om.

***

[...] the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.
For sheep are stupid and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent and have to be led.

***

"We get that in here some nights, when someone's had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether the gods exist. Next thing, there's a bolt of lightning through the door with a note wrapped round it saying, 'Yes, we do' and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out."

***

"Life's like a beach. And then you die."

***

The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.

***

Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him.

***

"What's a philosopher?" said Brutha.
"Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting," said a voice in his head.
"An infidel seeking the just fate he shall surely receive," said Vorbus. "An inventor of fallacies. This cursed city attracts them like a dung heap attracts flies."
"Actually, it's the climate," said the voice of the tortoise."Think about it. If you're inclined to leap out of your bath and run down the street every time you think you've got a bright idea, you don't want to do it somewhere cold. If you do do it somewhere cold, you die out."

***

"What do philosophers look like?" said Brutha."When they're not having a bath, I mean."
"They do a lot of thinking," said Om."Look for someone with a strained expression."
"That might just mean constipation."
"Well, so long as they're philosophical about it..."

***

The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote. [Footnote: Provided that he wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous, or a woman.]

***

"Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis.
"So I understand," said the Tyrant."I imagine that fish have no word for water."

***

It wasn't much of an ecological niche, but the lions were hanging on to it like grim death, which was what happened to most people who met a desert lion.

***

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.

***

Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey.

***

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

***

And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!"

***

"That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all 'Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth', and 'Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It', and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, 'Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles'."

***