He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.
Interpretation
The quote compares sex to cooking, suggesting that while people may fantasize about complexity, they often prefer simplicity in reality.
In this humorous observation, Terry Pratchett equates the human interest in sex to the culinary arts, illustrating how both can evoke great fascination and elaborate fantasies. Yet, just as many people might envision grand feasts but ultimately find satisfaction in simpler fare like egg and chips, the quote implies that in intimate relationships, simplicity often prevails over complexity, reflecting the reality of human desires and contentment.
In practice
This quote could be used in a conversation about relationships at a dinner party to lighten the mood.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity
Responding to a question about remarks attributed to him that he did not think were his: "I really didn't say everything I said."
I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.
No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Don't judge your taco by its price
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