I always loved browsing such posts on reddit, so thought I should make one on lemmy too
Edit: Usually these kind of posts only used to have excerpts from books or ancient proverbs, but now I am seeing a lot more quotes from shows/movies/games are also resonating with people. It’s pretty cool to see.
“The spaceships hung in the air, in much the same ways that bricks don’t” - Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy
I use this quote a lot when doing D&D Campaign prepping. It’s a fantastic example of a non-sensical sentence that somehow completely explains the subject
Some of my favourite Douglas Adams ones:
I often think of this one as well.
It parses fine really; there is a (possibly empty) set of things that hang in the air, and the spaceship is one of them, but bricks are not. It’s not nonsensical, it’s just a creative twist on a common idiom (“in much the same way a brick does”) that’s so unexpected it seems silly.
I also think of the later books where Arthur perfects the art of falling and missing the ground, sometimes.