Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.

It took place in the midnight in the University's Great Hall, in a welter of incense, candlesticks, runic inscriptions and magic circles, none of which was strictly necessary but which made the wizards feel better.

There is no real king anymore!” snapped the Supreme Grand Master. “What do you expect?Some people wandering in the wilderness for hundreds and hundreds of years, patiently handing down a sword and a birthmark? Some sort of magic?” He spat the word. He’d make use of magic,means to an end, end justifies means and so forth, but to go around believing it, believing it had some sort of moral force, like logic, made him wince.

The whole Creation was waiting for Rincewind to drop in. He did so. There didn't seem to be any alternative.

A new way to stop people from choking, which doesn’t even sound magical until you understand that a way of turning nearly dead people into fully alive people is worth a dozen spells that just go twing!

Why was it that when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She’d be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.She’d be a witch and a wizard too. And she would show them.

Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow halls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hyeroglyps, the true secret of longevity.They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn't, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.

... darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simplyits absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side ofdarkness, the light fantastic.It was a rather disappointing purple colour.