Call a Rabbit a Smeerp/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


"...it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms... (than) to invent a long series of wholly (alien) terms. In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying..."
Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, "To The Reader," Nightfall
"But the fact is that any fantasy world is, sooner or later, our own world. ... However towering the local mountains, however dwarf-haunted the local woods, any character wanting to eat a piece of zorkle meat between two slices of bread probably has no other word for it than 'sandwich'. ... The builder of fresh worlds may start out carefully avoiding Alsatian dogs and Toledo steel, but if he or she has any sense will one day look up from the keyboard and utter the words "What the hell?"
Terry Pratchett, "Introduction", The Unseen University Challenge
"This jackass just said that something can go 'through a ferrocrete bunker like a neutrino through plasma.' I get it, man. It says Star Wars on the cover. I know I'm reading about Star Wars. It's like, do they not have butter in space? Or hot knives to cut it with?"
As our story opens young Grumdrig has returned to Horbug following a trying stint in Spilwaer Spond where his laconic disposition and fertile mind bred a series of misadventures which had landed him outside the good graces of the Jordref there, Welham, who had secretly begun a long term course of slow but disaccomodating illpeel in the lad's morning fanwael. Meanwhile, though scarce a tuft of mansefur had yet made its appearance on the boy's manssach, a number of visiting Roilwachhs have begun to exhibit a discreet and seemingly inexplicable interest in the boy. Strange indeed, as he would not reach his krouchensterm for another harvest or more...
Progress Quest Manual