1 # NetHack 3.6.0 tribute to:
3 # Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett
4 # April 28, 1948 - March 12, 2015
5 # ("or until the ripples he caused in the world die away...")
12 %title The Colour of Magic (14)
13 # p. 67 (Signet edition; 'Morpork': initially Ankh and Morpork were twin
14 # cities with distinct characteristics on opposite sides of the Ankh
15 # river--they were eventually consolidated into Ankh-Morpork without
16 # regard to which area was where)
18 It has been remarked before that those who are sensitive to radiations in
19 the far octarine--the eighth colour, the pigment of the Imagination--can
20 see things that others cannot.
22 Thus it was that Rincewind, hurrying through the crowded, flare-lit,
23 evening bazaars of Morpork with the Luggage trundling behind him, jostled
24 a tall dark figure, turned to deliver a few suitable curses, and beheld
27 It had to be Death. No-one else went around with empty eye sockets and,
28 of course, the scythe over one shoulder was another clue. [...]
30 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
34 As he was drawn towards the Eye the terror-struck Rincewind raised the box
35 protectively, and at the same time heard the picture imp say, "They're
36 about ripe now, can't hold them any longer. Everyone smile, please."
39 --flash of light so white and so bright--
40 --it didn't seem like light at all.
42 Bel-Shamharoth screamed, a sound that started in the far ultrasonic and
43 finished somewhere in Rincewind's bowels. The tentacles went momentarily
44 as stiff as rods, hurling their various cargoes around the room, before
45 bunching up protectively in front of the abused Eye. The whole mass
46 dropped into the pit and a moment later the big slab was snatched up by
47 several dozen tentacles and slammed into place, leaving a number of
48 thrashing limbs trapped around the edge.
50 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
52 # p. 8 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
54 [...] In the meantime, they could only speculate about the revealed
57 There was, for example, the theory that A'Tuin had come from nowhere and
58 would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all
59 time. This theory was popular among academics.
61 An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that
62 A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were
63 all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant
64 turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for
65 the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be
66 born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang
69 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
71 # p. 13 (end of a long footnote; the initial obsession with 'eight' ended
72 # fairly quickly within the Discworld series)
76 There are, of course, eight days in a disc week and eight colours in its
77 light spectrum. Eight is a number of some considerable occult
78 significance on the disc and must never, ever, be spoken by a wizard.
80 Precisely why all the above should be so is not clear, but goes some way
81 to explain why, on the disc, the Gods are not so much worshipped as blamed.
83 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
85 # p. 38 (first speaker is Rincewind, second is a pre-Vetinari Patrician)
87 "I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord."
89 "Indeed? Then if I were you I'd sue my face for slander."
91 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
93 # p. 41 (title of 5th book is "Sourcery" but it's spelled "sorcery" here;
94 # 'organising': British spelling)
96 All the heroes of the Circle Sea passed through the gates of Ankh-Morpork
97 sooner or later. Most of them were from the barbaric tribes nearer the
98 frozen Hub, which had a sort of export trade in heroes. Almost all of
99 them had crude magic swords, whose unsuppressed harmonics on the astral
100 plane played hell with any delicate experiments in applied sorcery for
101 miles around, but Rincewind didn't object to them on that score. He knew
102 himself to be a magical dropout, so it didn't bother him that the mere
103 appearance of a hero at the city gates was enough to cause retorts to
104 explode and demons to materialize all through the Magical Quarter. No,
105 what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally
106 gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk. There were too many
107 of them, too. Some of the most notable questing grounds were a veritable
108 hubbub in the season. There was talk of organising a rota.
110 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
112 # pp. 82-83 (passage starts mid-paragraph;
113 # pronouns for deities are not capitalized;
114 # Bravd and the Weasel, obviously a parody of Fritz Leiber's
115 # Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, appear at the beginning of the 1st
116 # of 4 stories and then are left behind, never to be seen again;
117 # "wenegrade wiffard" is Rincewind and "fome fort of clerk" is
118 # Twoflower the tourist; the seemingly abrupt end of the passage
119 # is the end of the 2nd of the 4 stories that make up the book;
120 # 'centre': British spelling; 'billion': British usage gives it a
121 # value of 'million millions', equivalent to American 'trillion';
122 # the second paragraph of this passage is the data.base quote
123 # for "blind io" and the second half of the passage is the
124 # data.base quote for "*lady" and "offler")
126 [...] The disc gods themselves, despite the splendor of the world below
127 them, are seldom satisfied. It is embarrassing to know that one is a god
128 of a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have
129 its far end; especially when one can peer into other dimensions at worlds
130 whose Creators had more mechanical aptitude than imagination. No wonder,
131 then, that the disc gods spend more time bickering than in omnicognizance.
133 On this particular day Blind Io, by dint of constant vigilance the chief
134 of the gods, sat with his chin on his hand and looked at the gaming board
135 on the red marble table in front of him. Blind Io had got his name
136 because, where his eye sockets should have been, there were nothing but
137 two areas of blank skin. His eyes, of which he had an impressively large
138 number, led a semi-independent life of their own. Several were currently
139 hovering above the table.
141 The gaming board was a carefully-carved map of the disc world, overprinted
142 with squares. A number of beautifully modelled playing pieces were now
143 occupying some of the squares. A human onlooker would, for example, have
144 recognized in two of them the likenesses of Bravd and the Weasel. Others
145 represented yet more heroes and champions, of which the disc had a more
146 than adequate supply.
148 Still in the game were Io, Offler the Crocodile God, Zephyrus the god of
149 slight breezes, Fate, and the Lady. There was an air of concentration
150 around the board now that the lesser players had been removed from the
151 Game. Chance had been an early casualty, running her hero into a full
152 house of armed gnolls (the result of a lucky throw by Offler) and shortly
153 afterwards Night had cashed his chips, pleading an appointment with
154 Destiny. Several minor deities had drifted up and were kibitzing over
155 the shoulders of the players.
157 Side bets were made that the Lady would be the next to leave the board.
158 Her last champion of any standing was now a pinch of potash in the ruins
159 of still-smoking Ankh-Morpork, and there were hardly any pieces that she
160 could promote to first rank.
162 Blind Io took up the dice-box, which was a skull whose various orifices
163 had been stoppered with rubies, and with several of his eyes on the Lady
164 he rolled three fives.
166 She smiled. This was the nature of the Lady's eyes: they were bright
167 green, lacking iris or pupil, and they glowed from within.
169 The room was silent as she scrabbled in her box of pieces and, from the
170 very bottom, produced a couple that she set down on the board with two
171 decisive clicks. The rest of the players, as one God, craned forward to
174 "A wenegrade wiffard and fome fort of clerk," said Offler the Crocodile
175 God, hindered as usual by his tusks. "Well, weally!" With one claw he
176 pushed a pile of bone-white tokens into the centre of the table.
178 The Lady nodded slightly. She picked up the dice-cup and held it as steady
179 as a rock, yet all the gods could hear the three cubes rattling about
180 inside. And then she sent them bouncing across the table.
182 A six. A three. A five.
184 Something was happening to the five, however. Battered by the chance
185 collision of several billion molecules, the die flipped onto a point, spun
186 gently and came down a seven.
188 Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides.
190 "Come /on/," he said wearily. "Play fair."
192 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
194 # p. 84 (Ankh-Morpork was burned soon after Twoflower introduced the concept
195 # of fire insurance; a longer version of this passage is the data.base
196 # quote for "tourist")
198 Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard (B. Mgc.,
199 Unseen University [failed]). It was one of a number he had picked up
200 since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one.
201 Picturesque meant--he decided after careful observation of the scenery
202 that inspired Twoflower to use the word--that the landscape was horribly
203 precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through
204 which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
206 Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist,
207 Rincewind decided, meant "idiot."
209 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
211 # p. 85 ('memorising': British spelling)
213 Currently Twoflower was showing a great interest in the theory and practice
216 "It all seems, well, rather useless to me," he said. "I always thought
217 that, you know, a wizard just said the words and that was that. Not all
218 this tedious memorising."
220 Rincewind agreed moodily. He tried to explain that magic had indeed once
221 been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the
222 Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of
223 Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve
224 a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical
225 terms, this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was
226 relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light
227 patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in
228 the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic
229 preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of
230 leverage flicking his brain out through his ears.
232 He went on to add that some of the ancient magic could still be found in
233 its raw state, recognizable--to the initiated--by the eightfold shape it
234 made in the crystalline structure of space-time. There was the metal
235 octiron, for example, and the gas octogen. Both radiated dangerous
236 amounts of raw enchantment.
238 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
240 # p. 166 ('Lio!rt' with embedded exclamation point is correct; book's text
241 # is missing the opening quote before ["]You arrogant barbarian--")
243 "I challange you," said Hrun, glaring at the brothers, "both at once."
245 Lio!rt and Liartes exchanged looks.
247 "You'll fight us both together?" said Liartes, a tall, wiry man with long
252 "That's pretty uneven odds, isn't it?"
254 "Yah. I outnumber you one to two."
256 Lio!rt scowled. "You arrogant barbarian--"
258 "That just about does it!" growled Hrun. "I'll--"
260 The Loremaster put out a blue-veined hand to restrain him.
262 "It is forebidden to fight on the Killing Ground," he said, and paused
263 while he considered the sense of this. "You know what I mean, anyway," he
264 hazarded, giving up, and added, "As the challanged parties my lords Lio!rt
265 and Liartes have choice of weapons."
267 "Dragons," they said together. Liessa snorted.
269 "Dragons can be used offensively, therefore they are weapons," said Lio!rt
270 firmly. "If you disagree we can fight over it."
272 "Yah," said his brother, nodding at Hrun.
274 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
278 Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do.
279 Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had
280 long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality
283 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
285 # p. 201 (entire paragraph is enclosed within parentheses)
287 Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as
288 /annuals/, which were sown this year to come up later this year,
289 /biennials/, sown this year to grow next year, and /perennials/, sown this
290 year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare /re-annuals/
291 which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could
292 be planted this year to come up /last year/. The /vul/ nut vine was
293 particularly exceptional in that it could flourish as many as eight years
294 prior to its seed actually being sown. /Vul/ nut wine was reputed to give
295 certain drinkers an insight into the future which was, from the nut's
296 point of view, the past. Strange but true.
298 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
300 # p. 217 (Rincewind and Twoflower are slated to become ritual sacrifices)
302 "I hope you're not proposing to enslave us," said Twoflower.
304 Marchesa looked genuinely shocked. "Certainly not! Whatever could
305 have given you that idea? Your lives in Krull will be rich, full and
308 "Oh, good," said Rincewind.
310 "--just not very long."
312 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
314 # pp. 228-229 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
316 [...] She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her
317 never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest
318 need. And, then again, sometimes she didn't. She was like that. She
319 didn't like the clicking of rosaries, but was attracted to the sound of
320 dice. No man knew what She looked like, although there were many times
321 when a man who was gambling his life on the turn of the cards would pick
322 up the hand he had been dealt and stare Her full in the face. Of course,
323 sometimes he didn't. Among all the gods she was at one and the same time
324 the most courted and the most cursed.
326 [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
332 %title The Light Fantastic (12)
333 # p. 92 (Signet edition)
335 'Cohen ish my name, boy.' Bethan's hands stopped moving.
337 'Cohen?' she said. 'Cohen the Barbarian?'
341 'Hang on, hang on,' said Rincewind. 'Cohen's a great big chap, neck like a
342 bull, got chest muscles like a sack of footballs. I mean, he's the Disc's
343 greatest warrior, a legend in his own lifetime. I remember my grandad
344 telling me he saw him... my grandad telling me he... my grandad...'
346 He faltered under the gimlit gaze.
348 'Oh,' he said. 'Oh. Of course. Sorry.'
350 'Yesh,' said Cohen, and sighed. 'That's right boy. I'm a lifetime in my
353 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
355 # p. 113 (Twoflower is teaching the Riders how to play bridge;
356 # in /The Light Fantastic/, Death's dialog uses quotation marks
357 # and full uppercase rather than the small capital letters used in
360 Death sat at one side of a black baize table in the centre of the room,
361 arguing with Famine, War and Pestilence. Twoflower was the only one to
362 look up and notice Rincewind.
364 'Hey, how did you get here?' he said.
366 'Well, some say that the creator took a handful--oh, I see, well, it's
367 hard to explain but I--'
369 'Have you got the Luggage?'
371 The wooden box pushed past Rincewind and settled down in front of its
372 owner, who opened its lid and rummaged around inside until he came up with
373 a small, leatherbound book which he handed to War, who was hammering the
374 table with a mailed fist.
376 'It's "Nosehinger on the Laws of Contract",' he said. 'It's quite good,
377 there's a lot in it about double finessing and how to--'
379 Death snatched the book with a bony hand and flipped through the pages,
380 quite oblivious to the presence of the two men.
382 'RIGHT,' he said, 'PESTILENCE, OPEN ANOTHER PACK OF CARDS. I'M GOING TO
383 GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS IF IT KILLS ME. FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING OF COURSE.'
385 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
387 # p. 7 (passage starts mid-sentence; the too-long-to-answer question is
388 # "Why have Rincewind and Twoflower fallen off the Disc's rim?",
389 # alluding to the conclusion of /The Colour of Magic/;
390 # in /Sourcery/ and /Interesting Times/ and probably others, the
391 # famous philosohper's name is spelled "Ly Tin Wheedle")
393 [...] such questions take time and could be more trouble than they are
394 worth. For example, it is said that someone at a party once asked the
395 famous philosopher Ly Tin Weedle "Why are you here?" and the reply took
398 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
400 # p. 8 ('libraries': plural is accurate)
402 The only furnishing in the room was a lectern of dark wood, carved into the
403 shape of a bird--well, to be frank, into the shape of a winged thing it is
404 probably best not to examine too closely--and on the lectern, fastened to
405 it by a heavy chain covered in padlocks, was a book.
407 A large, but not particularly impressive, book. Other books in the
408 University's libraries had covers inlaid with rare jewels and fascinating
409 wood, or bound with dragon skin. This one was just a rather tatty leather.
410 It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as "slightly
411 foxed," although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though
412 it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.
414 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
418 The barbarian chieftain said: "What then are the greatest things that a
419 man may find in life?" This is the sort of thing you're supposed to say to
420 maintain steppecred in barbarian circles.
422 The man on his right thoughtfully drank his cocktail of mare's milk and
423 snowcat blood, and spoke thus: "The crisp horizon of the steppe, the wind
424 in your hair, a fresh horse under you."
426 The man on his left said: "The cry of the white eagle in the heights, the
427 fall of snow in the forest, a true arrow in your bow."
429 The chieftain nodded and said: "Surely it is the sight of your enemy
430 slain, the humiliation of his tribe and the lamentation of his women."
432 There was a general murmur of whiskery approval at this outrageous display.
434 Then the chieftain turned respectfully to his guest, a small figure
435 carefully warming his chilblains by the fire, and said: "But our guest,
436 whose name is legend, must tell us truly: what is it that a man may call
437 the greatest things in life?"
439 The guest paused in the middle of another unsuccessful attempt to light up.
441 "What shay?" he said, toothlessly.
443 "I said: what is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?"
445 The warriors leaned closer. This should be worth hearing.
447 The guest thought long and hard and then said, with deliberation: "Hot
448 water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper."
450 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
452 # p. 48 (Hanzel and Gretel, obviously...)
454 "Have a bit more table," said Rincewind.
456 "No thanks, I don't like marzipan," said Twoflower. "Anyway, I'm sure it's
457 not right to eat other people's furniture."
459 "Don't worry," said Swires. "The old witch hasn't been seen for years.
460 They say she was done up good and proper by a couple of young tearaways."
462 "Kids of today," said Rincewind.
464 "I blame the parents," said Twoflower.
466 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
470 It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because
471 one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots
472 who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally
473 suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say
474 the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those
475 studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association?
476 To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation coming from a
477 bunch of wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it,
478 of their mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards,
479 that just about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say
480 the heroes, why don't you...
482 And so on. This sort of thing has been going on for centuries, and caused
483 a number of major battles which have left large tracts of land uninhabitable
484 because of magical harmonics.
486 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
492 "Sort of mad. But mad with lots of money."
494 "Ah, then he can't be mad. I've been around; if a man hash lotsh of money
495 he'sh just ecshentric."
497 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
499 # p. 182 (Cohen is now wearing dentures with teeth made from diamonds)
501 Cohen tapped him on the shoulder. The man looked around irritably.
503 "What do you want, grandad?" he snarled.
505 Cohen paused until he had the man's full attention, and then he smiled. It
506 was a slow, lazy smile, unveiling about 300 carats of mouth jewelry that
507 seemed to light up the room.
509 "I will count to three," he said, in a friendly tone of voice. "One, Two."
510 His bony knee came up in the man's groin with a satisfyingly meaty noise,
511 and he half-turned to bring the full force of an elbow into the kidneys as
512 the leader collapsed around his private universe of pain.
514 "Three," to told the ball of agony on the floor. Cohen had heard of
515 fighting fair, and had long ago decided he wanted no part of it.
517 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
519 # pp. 193-194 (this passage is the data.base quote for shopkeeper)
521 There have been three general theories put forward to explain the
522 phenomenon of the wandering shops, or as they are generically known,
525 The first postulates that many thousands of years ago there evolved
526 somewhere in the multiverse a race whose single talent was to buy cheap
527 and sell dear. Soon they controlled a vast galactic empire or, as they put
528 it, Emporium, and the more advanced members of the species found a way to
529 equip their very shops with unique propulsion units that could break the
530 dark walls of space itself and open up vast new markets. And long after
531 the worlds of the Emporium perished in the heat death of their particular
532 universe, after one last defiant fire sale, the wandering starshops still
533 ply their trade, eating their way through the pages of space-time like a
534 worm through a three-volume novel.
536 The second is that they are the creation of a sympathetic Fate, charged
537 with the role of supplying exactly the right thing at the right time.
539 The third is that they are simply a very clever way of getting around the
540 various Sunday Closing acts.
542 All these theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They
543 explain the observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong.
545 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
549 "Where to they all come from?" said Twoflower, as they fled yet another mob.
551 "Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the
552 shopkeeper, "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than
553 a totally sane person."
555 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
557 # pp. 229-230 ('grey': British spelling is accurate)
559 Trymon was looking at him. /Something/ was looking at him. And still the
560 others hadn't noticed. Could he even explain it? Trymon looked the same
561 as he had always done, except for the eyes, and a slight sheen to his skin.
563 Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All
564 the demons in Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely
565 because they value souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the
566 universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the
567 grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even
568 according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn't even notice them.
570 [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
576 %title Equal Rites (10)
577 # p. 118 (Signet edition; passage starts mid-sentence and ends mid-paragraph)
579 [...] it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing
580 that what you're attempting can't be done. [...]
582 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
584 # p. 218 (speaker is Granny Weatherwax)
586 "Million-to-one chances," she said, "crop up nine times out of ten."
588 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
590 # pp. 96-97 ('Tannoy': public address speaker)
592 Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time
593 dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits
594 they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly
595 expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from,
596 and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives
597 it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never
598 tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.
600 The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things
601 around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens
602 of biological calendars and timepieces. There's thoughts about to be said,
603 and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and
604 a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is
605 a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once.
606 It is a complete FM waveband--and some of those stations aren't reputable,
607 they're outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with
610 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
614 Smith took a spade from beside the back door and hesitated.
620 "Do you know how wizards like to be buried?"
626 Granny paused at the bottom of the stairs.
630 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
634 Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it
635 was safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say that a
636 little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a
639 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
641 # pp. 113-114 (Esk is a young girl)
643 The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went
644 ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to
645 non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should
646 obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to
647 Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already
648 learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly
649 rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.
651 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
653 # pp. 119-120 (next passage is a direct continuation of this one)
655 The town was smaller than Ohulan, and very different because it lay on the
656 junction of three trade routes quite apart from the river itself. It was
657 built around one enormous square which was a cross between a permanent
658 exotic traffic jam and a tent village. Camels kicked mules, mules kicked
659 horses, horses kicked camels and they all kicked humans; there was a riot
660 of colours, a din of noise, a nasal orchestration of smells and the steady,
661 heady sound of hundreds of people working hard at making money.
663 One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other
664 people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc
665 had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back
666 on older, more traditional forms of banditry.
668 Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy
669 rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to
670 block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a
671 wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of
672 thought and muscle than more socially-acceptable professions but,
673 nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this,
674 plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands
675 on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.
677 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
679 # pp. 120-121 (this passage is a direct continuation of preceding one;
680 # "I said, what is happening here?" actually omits "is"
681 # but must be a typo--fixed here to avoid bug reports;
682 # 'broomstick' is Esk's disguised wizard's staff)
684 So a town like Zemphis was the place where caravans split, mingled and
685 came together again, as dozens of merchants and travellers banded together
686 for protection against the socially disadvantaged on the trails ahead.
687 Esk, wandering unregarded amidst the bustle, learned all this by the simple
688 method of finding someone who looked important and tugging on the hem of
691 This particular man was counting bales of tobacco and would have succeeded
692 but for the interruption.
696 "I said, what is happening here?"
698 The man meant to say: "Push off and bother someone else." He meant to
699 give her a light cuff about the head. So he was astonished to find himself
700 bending down and talking seriously to a small, grubby-faced child holding
701 a large broomstick (which also, it seemed to him later, was in some
702 indefinable way /paying attention/).
704 He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.
706 "People all get together to travel?"
712 "All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis... Ankh-Morpork, of course...."
714 "But the river goes there," said Esk, reasonably. "Barges. The Zoons."
716 "Ah, yes," said the merchant, "but they charge high prices and they can't
717 carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much."
719 "But they're very honest!"
721 "Huh, yes," he said. "But you know what they say: never trust an honest
722 man." He smiled knowingly.
726 "They do. You know. People," he said, a certain uneasiness entering his
729 "Oh," said Esk. She thought about it. "They must be very silly," she said
730 primly. "Thank you, anyway."
732 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
734 # pp. 127-128 (this time broomstick is Granny's defective witch's broomstick)
736 The broomstick lay between two trestles. Granny Weatherwax sat on a rock
737 outcrop while a dwarf half her height, wearing an apron that was a mass of
738 pockets, walked around the broom and occasionally poked it.
740 Eventually he kicked the bristles and gave a long intake of breath, a sort
741 of reverse whistle, which is the secret sign of craftsman across the
742 universe and means that something expensive is about to happen.
744 "Weellll," he said. "I could get the apprentices in to look at this, I
745 could. It's an education in itself. And you say it actually managed to
748 "It flew like a bird," said Granny.
750 The dwarf lit a pipe. "I should very much like to see that bird," he said
751 reflectively. "I should imagine it's quite something to watch, a bird like
754 "Yes, but can you repair it?" said Granny. "I'm in a hurry."
756 The dwarf sat down, slowly and deliberately.
758 "As for /repair/," he said, "well, I don't know about /repair/. Rebuild,
759 maybe. Of course, it's hard to get the bristles these days even if you can
760 find people to do the proper binding, and the spells need--"
762 "I don't want it rebuilt, I just want it to work properly," said Granny.
764 "It's an early model, you see," the dwarf plugged on. "Very tricky, those
765 early models. You can't get the wood--"
767 He was picked up bodily until his eyes were level with Granny's. Dwarves,
768 being magical in themselves as it were, are quite resistant to magic but
769 her expression looked as though she was trying to weld his eyeballs to the
772 "Just repair it," she hissed. "Please?"
774 "What, make a bodge job?" said the dwarf, his pipe clattering to the floor.
778 "Patch it up, you mean? Betray my training by doing half a job?"
780 "Yes," said Granny. Her pupils were two little black holes.
782 "Oh," said the dwarf. "Right, then."
784 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
786 # p. 185 (actually uses four periods to mark a sentence ending in a elipsis)
788 There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of
789 occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off
790 the shelves on to one's head, but the keeper of a /magic/ library is no job
791 for the unwary. Spells have power, and merely writing them down and
792 shoving them between covers doesn't do anything to reduce it. The stuff
793 leaks. Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic
794 with a mind of its own. Books of magic are usually chained to their
795 shelves, but not to prevent them being stolen....
797 [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
804 # p. 136 (Signet edition; passage is a footnote;
805 # Vetinari doesn't show up as recurring Patrician until /Sourcery/)
807 Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up
808 with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was
809 the Man; he had the Vote.
811 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
815 Mort was getting interested in the rock. It had curly shells in it, relics
816 of the early days of the world when the Creator had made creatures out of
817 stone, no-one knew why.
819 Mort was interested in lots of things. Why people's teeth fitted together
820 so neatly, for example. He'd given that one a lot of thought. Then there
821 was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night
822 when the light would come in useful. He knew the standard explanation,
823 which somehow didn't seem satisfying.
825 In short, Mort is one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag
826 full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic
829 Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one. The Creator had a
830 lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it
831 understandable hadn't been one of them.
833 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
837 "But you're Death," said Mort. "You go around killing people!"
839 I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE /GET/
840 KILLED, BUT THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER
841 ALL, IT'D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING,
844 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
848 "Is it magic?" said Mort.
850 WHAT DO YOU THINK? said Death. AM I REALLY HERE, BOY?
852 "Yes," said Mort slowly. "I... I've watched people. They look at you but
853 the don't see you, I think. You do something to their minds."
855 Death shook his head.
857 THEY DO IT ALL THEMSELVES, he said. THERE'S NO MAGIC. PEOPLE CAN'T SEE ME,
858 THEY SIMPLY WON'T ALLOW THEMSELVES TO DO IT. UNTIL IT'S TIME, OF COURSE.
859 WIZARDS CAN SEE ME, AND CATS. BUT YOUR AVERAGE HUMAN... NO, NEVER. He blew
860 a smoke ring at the sky, and added, STRANGE BUT TRUE.
862 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
864 # pp. 48-49 (Binky is Death's white horse, who was left 'parked' on a
865 # castle's roof; Mort is Death's novice apprentice)
867 They were on the roof before he spoke again.
869 YOU TRIED TO WARN HIM, he said, removing Binky's nosebag.
873 YOU CANNOT INTERFERE WITH FATE. WHO ARE YOU TO JUDGE WHO SHOULD LIVE AND
876 Death watched Mort's expression carefully.
878 ONLY THE GODS ARE ALLOWED TO DO THAT, he added. TO TINKER WITH THE FATE OF
879 EVEN ONE INDIVIDUAL COULD DESTROY THE WHOLE WORLD. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
881 Mort nodded miserably.
883 "Are you going to send me home?" he said.
885 Death reached down and swung him up behind the saddle.
887 BECAUSE YOU SHOWED COMPASSION? NO. I MIGHT HAVE DONE IF YOU HAD SHOWN
888 PLEASURE. BUT YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE.
894 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
896 # pp. 59-61 (in Ankh-Morpork, Mort has accidentally walked through a wall
897 # into an immigrant Klatchian family's dining room; 'the creature
898 # who was not there' refers to Death during an earlier event)
900 "I'm no demon! I'm a human!" he said, and stopped in shock as his words
901 emerged in perfect Klatch.
903 "You're a thief?" said the father. "A murderer? To creep in thus, are you
904 a /tax-gatherer/?" His hand slipped under the table and came up holding a
905 meat cleaver honed to paper thinness. His wife screamed and dropped the
906 plate and clutched the youngest children to her.
908 Mort watched the blade weave through the air, and gave in.
910 "I bring you greetings from the uttermost circles of hell," he hazarded.
912 The change was remarkable. The cleaver was lowered and the family broke
915 "There is much luck to us if a demon visits," beamed the father. "What is
916 your wish, O foul spawn of Offler's loins?"
920 "A demon brings blessing and good fortune on the man that helps it," said
921 the man. "How may we be of assistance, O evil dogsbreath of the nether
924 "Well, I'm not very hungry," said Mort, "but if you know where I can get a
925 fast horse, I could be in Sto Lat before sunset."
927 The man beamed and bowed. "I know the very place, noxious extrusion of the
928 bowels, if you would be so good as to follow me."
930 Mort hurried out after him. The ancient ancestor watched them go with a
931 critical expression, its jowls rhymically chewing.
933 "That was what they call a demon around here?" it said. "Offler rot this
934 country of dampness, even their demons are third-rate, not a patch on the
935 demons we had in the Old Country."
937 The wife placed a small bowl of rice in the folded middle pair of hands of
938 the Offler statue (it would be gone in the morning) and stood back.
940 "Husband did say that last month at the /Curry Gardens/ he served a creature
941 who was not there," she said. "He was impressed."
943 Ten minutes later the man returned and, in solemn silence, placed a small
944 heap of gold coins on the table. They represented enough wealth to
945 purchase quite a large part of the city.
947 "He had a bag of them," he said.
949 The family stared at the money for some time. The wife sighed.
951 "Riches bring many problems," she said. "What are we to do?"
953 "We return to Klatch," said the husband firmly, "where our children can grow
954 up in a proper country, true to the glorious traditions of our ancient race
955 and men do not need to work as waiters for wicked masters but can stand tall
956 and proud. And we must leave right now, fragrant blossom of the date palm."
958 "Why so soon, O hard-working son of the desert?"
960 "Because," said the man, "I have just sold the Patrician's champion
963 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
965 # pp. 139-140 (passage ends mid-sentence)
967 "You don't know much about monarchy, do you?" said Keli.
971 "She means better to be a dead queen in your own castle than a live
972 commoner somewhere else," said Cutwell, [...]
974 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
978 "You mean you won't help?" said Mort. "Not even if you can?"
980 "Give the boy a prize," growled Albert. "And it's no good thinking you can
981 appeal to my better nature under this here crusty exterior," he added,
982 "'cos my interior's pretty damn crusty too."
984 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
986 # pp. 159-160 (Death has come to an employment agency--a new concept in
987 # Ankh-Morpork--looking for a job)
989 "And what was your previous position?"
993 "What did you do for a living?" said the thin young man behind the desk.
995 I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS
996 THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD.
998 "Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?"
1000 I SUPPOSE A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF EXPERTISE WITH AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS? he
1001 ventured after a while.
1003 The young man shook his head firmly.
1007 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
1011 Death raised his skull and sniffed the air.
1013 The sound cut through all the other noises in the hall and forced them
1016 It is the kind of noise that is heard on the twilight edges of dreams,
1017 the sort that you wake from in the cold sweat of mortal horror. It was
1018 the snuffling under the door of dread. It was like the snuffling of a
1019 hedgehog, but if so then it was the kind of hedgehog that crashes out of
1020 the verges and flattens lorries. It was the kind of noise you wouldn't
1021 want to hear twice; you wouldn't want to hear it /once/.
1023 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
1027 "Well, that was a lesson to all of us," the bursar continued, brushing dust
1028 and candle wax off his robe. He looked up, expecting to see the statue of
1029 Alberto Malich back on its pedestal.
1031 "Clearly even statues have feelings," he said. "I myself recall, when I
1032 was but a first-year student, writing my name on his... well, never mind.
1033 The point is, I propose here and now we replace the statue."
1035 Dead silence greeted this suggestion.
1037 "With, say, an exact likeness cast in gold. Suitably embellished with
1038 jewels, as befits our great founder," he went on brightly.
1040 "And to make sure no students deface it in any way I suggest we then erect
1041 it in the deepest cellar," he continued.
1043 "And then lock the door," he added. Several wizards began to cheer up.
1045 "And throw away the key?" said Rincewind.
1047 "And /weld/ the door," the bursar said. He had just remembered about The
1048 Mended Drum. He thought for a while and remembered about the physical
1049 fitness regime as well.
1051 "And then brick up the doorway," he said. There was a round of applause.
1053 "And throw away the brick layer!" chortled Rincewind, who felt he was
1054 getting the hang of this.
1056 The bursar scowled at him. "No need to get carried away," he said.
1058 [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
1064 %title Sourcery (10)
1065 # p. 9 (Signet edition; passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
1067 "[...] And what would humans be without love?"
1069 RARE, said Death. [...]
1071 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1074 They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done.
1075 They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the
1076 attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in
1079 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1081 # p. 11 ('worth while': two words is accurate, although strange)
1083 "I meant," said Ipslore, bitterly, "what is there in this world that makes
1084 living worth while?"
1086 CATS, he said eventually, CATS ARE NICE.
1090 MANY HAVE, said Death evenly.
1092 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1094 # pp. 40-41 (text has 'the moment and the words' which is obviously a typo;
1095 # it might have intended 'that' for 'and'; we just drop 'and')
1097 The thief, as will become apparent, was a special type of thief. This
1098 thief was an artist of theft. Other thieves merely stole everything that
1099 was not nailed down, but this thief stole the nails as well. This thief
1100 had scandalised Ankh by taking a particular interest in stealing, with
1101 astonishing success, things that were in fact not only nailed down but
1102 also guarded by keen-eyed guards in inaccessible strongrooms. There are
1103 artists that will paint an entire chapel ceiling; this was the kind of
1104 thief that could steal it.
1106 This particular thief was credited with stealing the jeweled disemboweling
1107 knife from the temple of Offler the Crocodile God during the middle of
1108 Evensong, and the silver shoes from the Patrician's finest racehorse
1109 while it was in the process of winning a race. When Gritoller Mimpsey,
1110 vice-president of the Thieves' Guild, was jostled in the marketplace and
1111 then found on returning home that a freshly-stolen handful of diamonds
1112 had vanished from their place of concealment, he knew who to blame.(1)
1113 This was the type of thief that could steal the initiative, the moment the
1114 words were out of your mouth.
1116 (1) This was because Gritoller had swallowed the jewels for safe keeping.
1118 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1120 # pp. 63-64 ('Compleet', 'Majik', 'enterr', 'physycal', 'hys', 'bodie',
1121 # 'Destinie', 'Deathe', 'werre', 'nowe', 'menne', 'Ende',
1122 # 'Worlde', 'hadd', 'bee', 'goddes', 'ould', 'Apocralypse',
1123 # 'legende', 'thee': all accurate; 'ould' may be a typo...)
1125 It was deathly quiet in the Library. The books were no longer frantic.
1126 They'd passed through their fear and out into the calm waters of abject
1127 terror, and they crouched on their shelves like so many mesmerised rabbits.
1129 A long hairy arm reached up and grabbed /Casplock's Compleet Lexicon of
1130 Majik and Precepts for the Wise/ before it could back away, soothed its
1131 terror with a long-fingered hand, and opened it under 'S'. The Librarian
1132 smoothed the trembling page gently and ran a horny nail down the entries
1135 *Sourceror*, /n. (mythical). A proto-wizard, a doorway through/
1136 /which new majik may enterr the world, a wizard not limited by/
1137 /the physycal capabilities of hys own bodie, not by Destinie,/
1138 /nor by Deathe. It is written that there once werre sourcerors/
1139 /in the youth of the world but not may there by nowe and blessed/
1140 /be, for sourcery is not for menne and the return of sourcery/
1141 /would mean the Ende of the Worlde... If the Creator hadd meant/
1142 /menne to bee as goddes, he ould have given them wings./
1143 /SEE ALSO: thee Apocralypse, the legende of thee Ice Giants,/
1144 /and thee Teatime of the Goddes./
1146 The Librarian read the cross-references, turned back to the first entry,
1147 and stared at it through deep dark eyes for a long time. Then he put the
1148 book back carefully, crept under his desk, and pulled the blanket over
1151 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1155 The current Patrician, head of the extremely rich and powerful Vetinari
1156 family, was thin, tall and apparently as cold-blooded as a dead penguin.
1157 Just by looking at him you could tell he was the sort of man you'd expect
1158 to keep a white cat, and caress it idly while sentencing people to death
1159 in a piranha tank; and you'd hazard for good measure that he probably
1160 collected rare, thin porcelain, turning it over and over in his blue-white
1161 fingers while distant screams echoed from the depths of the dungeons. You
1162 wouldn't put it past him to use the word "exquisite" and have thin lips.
1163 He looked the kind of person who, when they blinked, you mark it off on
1166 Practically none of this was in fact the case, although he did have a small
1167 and exceedingly elderly wire-haired terrior called Wuffles that smelled
1168 badly and wheezed at people. It was said to be the only thing in the
1169 entire world he truly cared about. He did of course sometimes have people
1170 horribly tortured to death, but this was considered to be perfectly
1171 acceptable behaviour for a civic ruler and generally approved of by the
1172 overwhelming majority of citizens.(1) The people of Ankh are of a
1173 practical persuasion, and felt that the Patrician's edict forebidding all
1174 street theatre and mime artists made up for a lot of things. He didn't
1175 administer a reign of terror, just the occasional light shower.
1177 (1) The overwhelming majority of citizens being defined in this case as
1178 everyone not currently hanging upside down over a scorpion pit.
1180 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1184 "What exactly /is/ the Aprocralypse?"
1186 Rincewind hesitated. "Well," he said, "it's the end of the world. Sort
1189 "Sort of? /Sort of/ the end of the world? You mean we won't be certain?
1190 We'll all look around and say 'Pardon me, did you hear something?'?"
1192 "It's just that no two seers have ever agreed about it. There have been
1193 all kinds of vague predictions. Quite mad, some of them. So it was
1194 called the Apocralypse." He looked embarrassed. "It's a sort of
1195 apocryphal Apocalypse. A kin of pun, you see."
1197 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1201 "You're very quiet, Spelter. Do you not agree?"
1203 No. The world had sourcery once, and gave it up for wizardry. Wizardry is
1204 magic for men, not gods. It's not for us. There was something wrong with
1205 it, and we have forgotten what it was. I liked wizardry. It didn't upset
1206 the world. It fitted. It was right. A wizard was all I wanted to be.
1208 He looked down at his feet.
1210 "Yes," he whispered.
1212 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1214 # pp. 141-142 (Rincewind and Nijel have just entered a harem)
1216 Rincewind had eyes for none of this. [...] they were swamped by the
1217 considerably bigger flood of panic at the sight of four guards turning
1218 towards him with scimitars in their hands and the light of murder in their
1221 Without hesitation, Rincewind took a step backwards.
1223 "Over to you, friend," he said.
1227 Nijel drew his sword and held it out in front of him, his arms trembling at
1230 There were a few seconds of total silence as everyone waited to see what
1231 would happen next. And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind
1232 would never quite forget to the end of this life.
1234 "Erm," he said, "excuse me...."
1236 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1240 The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively
1241 that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an
1242 illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers
1243 because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of
1244 wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably
1245 the Disc's greatest philosopher,(1) who after some thought proclaimed that
1246 although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was
1249 And so psychic order was restored. Distance is, however, an entirely
1250 subjective phenomenon and creatures of magic can adjust it to suit
1253 They are not necessarily very good at it.
1255 (1) He always argued that he was.
1257 [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
1263 %title Wyrd Sisters (15)
1264 # p. 318 (ROC edition; passage starts mid-paragraph;
1265 # speaker is Granny Weatherwax)
1267 "[...] Destiny /is/ important, see, but people go wrong when they think it
1268 controls them. It's the other way around."
1270 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1274 Verence tried to avoid walking through walls. A man had his dignity.
1276 He became aware that he was being watched.
1280 There was a cat sitting in the doorway, subjecting him to a slow blink. It
1281 was a mottled grey and extremely fat...
1283 No. It was extremely /big/. It was covered with so much scar tissue that
1284 it looked like a fist with fur on it. Its ears were a couple of perforated
1285 stubs, its eyes two yellow slits of easy-going malevolence, its tail a
1286 twitching series of question marks as it stared at him.
1288 Greebo had heard that Lady Felmet had a small white female cat and had
1289 strolled up to pay his respects.
1291 Verence had never seen an animal with so much built-in villainy. He didn't
1292 resist as it waddled across the floor and dried to rub itself against his
1293 legs, purring like a waterfall.
1295 "Well, well," said the king, vaguely. He reached down and made an effort
1296 to scratch it behind the two ragged bits on top of its head. It was a
1297 relief to find someone else besides another ghost who could see him, and
1298 Greebo, he couldn't help feeling, was a distinctly unusual cat. Most of
1299 the castle cats were either pampered pets or flat-eared kitchen and stable
1300 habitues who generally resembled the very rodents they lived on. This cat,
1301 on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of
1302 course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for
1303 secret wisdom in the creatures, Greebo radiated genuime intelligence. He
1304 also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus
1305 trouble in a dead fox.
1307 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1311 He wondered if ghosts hunted. Almost certainly not, he imagined. Or ate,
1312 or drank either for that matter, and that was really depressing. He liked
1313 a big noisy banquet and had quaffed(1) many a pint of good ale. And bad
1314 ale, come to that. He'd never been able to tell the difference till the
1315 following morning, usually.
1317 (1) Quaffing is like drinking, but you spill more.
1319 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1321 # pp. 60-61 (dwarfish mechanics: see /Equal Rites/)
1323 Granny Weatherwax milked and fed the goats, banked the fire, and put a
1324 cloth over the mirror and pulled her broomstick out from behind the door.
1325 She went out, locked the door behind her, and hung the key on its nail in
1328 This was quite sufficient. Only once, in the entire history of witchery
1329 in the Ramtops, had a thief broken into a witch's cottage. The witch
1330 concerned visited the most terrible punishment on him.(1)
1332 Granny sat on the broom and muttered a few words, but without much
1333 conviction. After a further couple of tries, she got off, fiddled with
1334 the binding, and had another go. There was a suspicion of glitter from
1335 one end of the stick, which quickly died away.
1337 "Drat," she said, under her breath.
1339 She looked around carefully, in case anyone was watching. In fact it was
1340 only a hunting badger who, hearing the thumping of running feet, poked its
1341 head out from the bushes and saw Granny hurtling down the path with the
1342 broomstick held stiff-armed beside her. At last the magic caught, and she
1343 managed to vault clumsily on to it before it trundled into the night sky
1344 as gracefully as a duck with one wing missing.
1346 From above the trees came a muffled cursd against all dwarfish mechanics.
1348 (1) She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village
1349 she'd smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the
1350 suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it
1351 all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and
1352 never went home again.
1354 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1356 # p. 76 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
1358 And, with alarming suddenness, nothing happened.
1360 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1362 # p. 82 ('/Good/ fool': lowercase 'fool' is accurate)
1364 "Is this a dagger I see before me?" he mumbled.
1366 "Um. No, my lord. It's my hankerchief, you see. You can sort of tell the
1367 difference if you look closely. It doesn't have as many sharp edges."
1369 "/Good/ fool," said the duke, vaguely.
1371 Totally mad, the Fool thought. Several bricks short of a bundle. So far
1372 round the twist you could use him to open wine bottles.
1374 "Kneel beside me," my Fool.
1376 The Fool did so. The duke laid a soiled bandage on his shoulder.
1378 "Are you loyal, Fool?" he said. "Are you trustworthy?"
1380 "I swore to follow my lord until death," said the Fool hoarsely.
1382 The duke pressed his mad face close to the Fool, who looked up into a pair
1385 "I didn't want to," he hissed conspiratorially. "They made me do it. I
1388 The door swung open. The dutchess filled the doorway. In fact, she was
1389 nearly the same shape.
1391 "Leonal!" she barked.
1393 The fool was fascinated by what happened to the duke's eyes. The mad red
1394 flame vanished, was sucked backwards, and replaced by the hard blue stare
1395 he had come to recognize. It didn't mean, he realized, that the duke was
1396 any less mad. Even the coldness of his sanity was madness in a way. The
1397 duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly
1400 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1404 On the crest of the moor, where in the summer partridges lurked among the
1405 bushes like small, whirring idiots, was a standing stone. It stood roughly
1406 where the witches' territories met, although the boundaries were never
1407 formally marked out.
1409 The stone was about the same height as a tall man, and made of a bluish
1410 tinted rock. It was considered intensely magical because, although there
1411 was only one of it, /no-one had ever been able to count it/; if it saw
1412 anyone looking at it speculatively, it shuffled behind them. It was the
1413 most self-effacing monolith ever discovered.
1415 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1417 # p. 92 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
1419 Demons were like genies or philosophy professors--if you didn't word things
1420 /exactly/ right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and
1421 completely misleading answers.
1423 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1427 Nanny Ogg was also out early. She hadn't been able to get any sleep
1428 anyway, and besides, she was worried about Greebo. Greebo was one of her
1429 few blind spots. While intellectually she would concede that he was
1430 indeed a fat, cunning, evil-smelling multiple rapist, she nevertheless
1431 instinctively pictured him as the small fluffy kitten he had been decades
1432 before. The fact that he had once chased a female wolf up a tree and
1433 seriously surprised a she-bear who had been innocently digging for roots
1434 didn't stop her worrying that something bad might happen to him. It was
1435 generally considered by everyone else in the kingdom that the only thing
1436 that might slow Greebo down was a direct meteorite strike.
1438 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1440 # p. 133 (the duke has locked Nanny Ogg in the castle dungeon)
1442 "I really advise you all to return home," said Granny Weatherwax. "There
1443 has probably been a misunderstanding. Everyone knows a witch cannot be
1444 held against her will."
1446 "It's gone too far this time," said a peasant. "All this burning and
1447 taxing and now this. I blame you witches. It's got to stop. I know my
1450 "What rights are they?" said Granny.
1452 "Dunnage, cowhage-in-ordinary, badinage, leftovers, scrommidge, clary and
1453 spunt." said the peasant promptly. "And acornage, every other year, and
1454 the right to keep two-thirds of a goat on the common. Until he set fire to
1455 it. It was a bloody good goat, too."
1457 "A man could go far, knowing his rights like you do," said Granny. "But
1458 right now he should go home."
1460 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1464 "Whatever happened to the rule about not meddling in politics?" said Magrat,
1465 watching her retreating back.
1467 Nanny Ogg massaged some like back into her fingers.
1469 "By Hoki, that woman's got a jaw like an anvil," she said. "What was that?"
1471 "I said, what about this rule about not meddling?" said Magrat.
1473 "Ah," said Nanny. She took the girl's arm. "The thing is," she explained,
1474 "as you advance in the Craft, you'll learn there is another rule. Esme's
1475 obeyed it all her life."
1479 "When you break rules, break 'em good and hard," said Nanny, and grinned a
1480 set of gums that were more menacing than teeth.
1482 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1486 "I mean it. Look at me. I wasn't supposed to be writing plays. Dwarfs
1487 aren't even supposed to be able to /read/. I shouldn't worry too much
1488 about destiny, if I was you. I was destined to be a miner. Destiny gets
1489 it wrong half the time."
1491 "But you said he looks like the Fool person. I can't see it myself, mark
1494 "The light's got to be right."
1496 "Could be some destiny at work there."
1498 Hwel shrugged. Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn't trust it.
1499 Often you couldn't even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it
1500 turned out to be something else--coincidence, maybe, or providence. You
1501 barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when
1502 you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.
1504 He used destiny a lot. As a tool for his plays it was even better than a
1505 ghost. There was nothing like a bit of destiny to get the old plot rolling.
1506 But it was a mistake to think you could spot the shape of it. And as for
1507 thinking it could be controlled...
1509 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1511 # p. 242 (passage starts mid-paragraph; Lancre has recently come out of a
1512 # magic-induced 15-year stasis; 'things ... is': 'things' plural is
1513 # accurate, though probably a typo)
1515 On top of the general suspicion of witches, it was dawning on the few people
1516 in Lancre who had any dealings with the outside world that a) either more
1517 things had been happening than they had heard about before or b) time was
1518 out of joint. It wasn't easy to prove(1) but the few traders who came along
1519 the mountain tracks after the winter seemed to be rather older than they
1520 should have been. Unexplained happenings were always more or less expected
1521 in the Ramtops because of the high magical potential, but several years
1522 disappearing overnight was a bit of a first.
1524 (1) Because of the way time was recorded among the various states, kingdoms
1525 and cities. After all, when over an area of a hundred square miles the same
1526 year is variously the Year of the Small Bat, the Anticipated Monkey, the
1527 Hunting Cloud, Fat Cows, Three Bright Stallions and at least nine numbers
1528 recording the time since(2) assorted kings, prohets, and strange events were
1529 either crowned, born or happened, and each year was a different number of
1530 months, and some of them don't have weeks, and one of them refuses to accept
1531 the day as a measure of time, the only things it is possible to be sure of
1532 is that good sex doesn't last long enough.(3)
1534 (2) The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts /down/, not up. No-one
1535 knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.
1537 (3) Except for the Zapingo tribe of the Great Nef, of course.
1539 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1541 # p. 250 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
1543 It was a land of describable beauty.
1545 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1547 # p. 265 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
1549 The past used to be a lot better than it is now.
1551 [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
1557 %title Pyramids (11)
1558 # p. 218 (ROC edition)
1559 %passage 1 (passage ends mid-paragraph)
1560 What a chap needed at a time like this was a sign, some sort of book of
1561 instructions. The trouble with life was that you didn't get a chance to
1562 practice before doing it for real.
1564 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1566 # p. 128 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
1568 Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a
1569 human being to be really stupid.
1571 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1573 # pp. 9-10 ('tlingas' is accurate)
1575 It was a full-length mirror. All assassins had a full-length mirror in
1576 their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them
1577 when you were badly dressed.
1579 Teppic examined himself critically. The outfit had cost him his last
1580 penny, and was heavy on the black silk. It whispered as he moved. It was
1583 At least the headache was going. It had nearly crippled him all day; he'd
1584 been in dread of having to start the run with purple spots in front of his
1587 He sighed and opened the black box and took out his rings and slipped them
1588 on. Another box held a set of knives of Klatchian steel, their blades
1589 darkened with lamp black. Various cunning and intricate devices were taken
1590 from velvet bags and dropped into pockets. A couple of long-bladed
1591 throwing /tlingas/ were slipped into their sheaths inside his boots. A
1592 thin silk line and folding grapnel were wound around his waist, over the
1593 chain-mail shirt. A blowpipe was attached to its leather thong and dropped
1594 down his back under his cloak; Teppic pocketed a slim tin container with an
1595 assortment of darts, their tips corked and their stems braille-coded for
1596 ease of selection in the dark.
1598 He winced, checked the blade of his rapier and slung the baldric over his
1599 right shoulder, to balance the bag of lead slingshot ammunition. As an
1600 afterthought he opened his sock drawer and took a pistol crossbow, a flask
1601 of oil, a roll of lockpicks and, after some consideration, a punch dagger,
1602 a bag of assorted caltraps and a set of brass knuckles.
1604 Teppic picked up his hat and checked its lining for the coil of cheesewire.
1605 He placed it on his head at a jaunty angle, took a last satisfied look at
1606 himself in the mirror, turned on his heel and, very slowly, fell over.
1608 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1612 He'd always remember the first night in the dormitory. It was long enough
1613 to accommodate all eighteen boys in Viper House, and draughty enough to
1614 accommodate the great outdoors. Its designer may have had comfort in mind,
1615 but only so that he could avoid it whenever possible: he had contrived a
1616 room that could actually be colder than the weather outside.
1618 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1622 A few stars had been let out early. Teppic looked up at them. Perhaps, he
1623 thought, there is life somewhere else. On the stars, maybe. If it's true
1624 that there are billions of universes stacked along side one another, the
1625 thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere.
1627 But wherever they are, no matter how mightily they try, no matter how
1628 magnificent the effort, they surely can't manage to be as godawfully stupid
1629 as us. I mean, we work at it. We were given a spark of it to start with,
1630 but over hundreds of thousands of years we've really improved on it.
1632 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1634 # p. 96 (Ptaclusp the pyramid builder, sons Ptaclusp IIa and Ptaclusp IIb)
1636 Descendants! The gods had seen fit to give him one son who charged you for
1637 the amount of breath expended in saying "Good morning", and another one who
1638 worshipped geometry and stayed up all night designing aqueducts. You
1639 scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and
1640 paid you back by getting educated.
1642 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1646 It's a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such
1647 thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is
1648 apparently part of the job spec.
1650 High priests tend to get put in the same category. They have to face the
1651 implied assumption that no sooner do they get the funny hat than they're
1652 issuing strange orders, e.g., princesses tied to rocks for itinerant sea
1653 monsters and throwing little babies in the sea.
1655 This is a gross slander. Throughout the history of the Disc most high
1656 priests have been serious, pious and conscientious men who have done their
1657 best to interpret the wishes of the gods, sometimes disembowelling or
1658 flaying alive hundreds of people in a day in order to make sure they're
1659 getting it absolutely right.
1661 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1663 # pp. 206-208 (text has 'that's now it happened'; 'now' changed to 'how' here)
1665 Copolymer, the greatest storyteller in the history of the world, sat back
1666 and beamed at the greatest minds in the world, assembled at the dining
1669 Teppic had added another iota to his store of new knowledge. 'Symposium'
1670 meant a knife-and-fork tea.
1672 "Well," said Copolymer, and launched into the story of the Tsortean Wars.
1674 "You see, what happened was, /he'd/ taken /her/ back home, and her
1675 father--this wasn't the old king, this was the one before, the one with the
1676 wossname, he married some girl from over Elharib way, she had a squint,
1677 what was her name now, began with a P. Or an L. One of them letters,
1678 anyway. Her father owned an island out on the bay there, Papylos I think
1679 it was. No, I tell a lie, it was Crinix. /Anyway/ the king, the other
1680 king, he raised an army and they.... Elenor, that was her name. She had
1681 a squint, you know. But quite attractive, they say. When I say married,
1682 I trust I do not have to spell it out for you. I mean, it was a bit
1683 unofficial. Er. Anyway, there was this wooden horse and after they'd got
1684 in... Did I tell you about this horse? It was a horse. I'm pretty sure
1685 it was a horse. Or maybe it was a chicken. Forget my own name next! It
1686 was wossname's idea, the one with the limp. Yes. The limp in his leg, I
1687 mean. Did I mention him? There'd been this fight. No, that was the other
1688 one, I think. Yes. Anyway, this wooden pig, damn clever idea, they made
1689 it out of thing. Tip of my tongue. Wood. But that was later, you know.
1690 The fight! Nearly forgot the fight. Yes. Damn good fight. Everyone
1691 banging on their shields and yelling. Wossname's armour shone like shining
1692 armour. Fight and a half, that fight. Between thingy, not the one with
1693 the limp, the other one, wossname, had red hair. /You/ know. Tall fellow,
1694 talked with a lisp. Hold on, just remembered, he was from some other
1695 island. Not him. The other one, with the limp. Didn't want to go, he
1696 said he was mad. Of course, he /was/ bloody mad, definitely. I mean, a
1697 wooden cow! Like wossname said, the king, no not that king, the other one,
1698 he saw the goat, he said 'I fear the Ephibeans, especially when they're mad
1699 enough to leave bloody great wooden livestock on the doorstep, talk about
1700 nerve, they must think we was born yesterday, set fire to it,' and, of
1701 course, wossname had nipped in round the back and put everyone to the
1702 sword, talk about laugh. Did I say she had a squint? They said she was
1703 pretty, but it takes all sorts. Yes. Anyway, that's how it happened.
1704 /Now/, of course, wossname--I think he was called Melycanus, had a limp--he
1705 wanted to go home, well, you would, they'd been there for /years/, he
1706 wasn't getting any younger. That's why he dreamt up the thing about the
1707 wooden wossname. Yes. I tell a lie, Lavaelous was the one with the knee.
1708 Pretty good fight, that fight, take it from me."
1710 He lapsed into self-satisfied silence.
1712 "Pretty good fight," he mumbled and, smiling faintly, dropped off to sleep.
1714 Teppic was aware that his own mouth was hanging open. He shut it. Along
1715 the table several of the diners were wiping their eyes.
1717 "Magic," said Xeno. "Sheer magic. Every word a tassle on the canopy of
1720 "It's the way he remembers every tiny detail. Pin sharp," murmured Ibid.
1722 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1726 "I'd love to stay and listen to you listening to me all day," he said.
1727 "But there's a man over there I'd like to see."
1729 "That's amazing," said Endos, making a short note and turning his attention
1730 to a conversation further along the table. A philosopher had averred that
1731 although truth was beauty, beauty was not necessarily truth, and a fight was
1732 breaking out. Endos listened carefully.(1)
1734 (1) The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is
1735 well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone
1736 else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next. True Listeners
1737 have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity
1738 value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find,
1739 or at least hard to find twice.
1741 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1743 # p. 278 (perhaps ought to end this one with the first paragraph...)
1745 In the middle of the firestorm the Great Pyramid appeared to lift up a few
1746 inches, on a beam of incandescence, and turn through ninety degrees. This
1747 was almost certainly the special type of optical illusion which can take
1748 place /even though no-one is actually looking at it/.
1750 And then, with deceptive slowness and considerable dignity, it exploded.
1752 It was almost too crass a word. What it did was this: it came apart
1753 ponderously into building-sized chunks which drifted gently away from one
1754 another, flying serenely out and over the necropolis. Several of them
1755 struck other pyramids, badly damaging them in a lazy, unselfconscious way,
1756 and then bounded on in silence until they ploughed to a halt behind a small
1759 Only then did the boom come. It went on for quite a long time.
1761 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1763 # p. 280 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
1765 Man was never intended to understand things he meddled with.
1767 [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
1773 %title Guards! Guards! (14)
1774 # p. 283 (ROC edition)
1776 "I see you're very comfortable here," said Vimes weakly.
1778 "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in
1779 yourself," said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. "The
1780 world would be a happier place if more people remembered that."
1782 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1786 These weren't encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a
1787 longbow's arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred
1788 yards away rather than the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.
1790 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1792 # p. 26 (first and second paragraphs are actually end of one section,
1793 # start of next one; first 'Thunder rolled...' had three dot
1794 # elipsis, second hand has four, elipsis plus final period--
1795 # first changed to four here so that they match)
1799 It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games,
1800 and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and
1801 what the rules are--who knows?
1803 Best not to speculate.
1809 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1811 # p. 48 (passage is a footnote)
1813 One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make
1814 the Thieves' Guilde /responsible/ for theft, with annual budgets, forward
1815 planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an
1816 agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it
1817 that unauthorized crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was
1818 generally a stick with nails in it.
1820 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1822 # p. 87 (passage ends mid-paragraph)
1824 "Well, sir," he said, "I know that dragons have been extinct for thousands
1827 "Yes?" The Patrician's eyes narrowed.
1829 Vimes plunged on. "But sir, the thing is, do /they/ know?" [...]
1831 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1833 # p. 114 (passage is a footnote)
1835 The Guild of Fire Fighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous
1836 year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract
1837 from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately,
1838 the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters
1839 would tend to go to prospective clients' houses in groups, making loud
1840 comments like "Very inflammable looking place, this" and "Probably go up
1841 like a firework with just one carelessly dropped match, know what I mean?"
1843 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1845 # p. 131 (Sherlock Holmes)
1847 Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however
1848 improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was
1849 impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right.
1851 There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time....
1853 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1855 # p. 150 (Dirty Harry with a small swamp dragon rather than a .45 Magnum...)
1857 A streak of green fire blasted out of the back of the shed, passed a foot
1858 over the heads of the mob, and burned a charred rosette in the woodwork
1861 Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of shear deadly menace.
1863 "/This is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the
1864 city. It could burn your head clean off./"
1866 Captain Vimes limped forward from the shadows.
1868 A small and extremely frightened golden dragon was clamped firmly under one
1869 arm. His other hand held it by the tail.
1871 The rioters watched it, hypnotised.
1873 "Now I know what you're thinking," Vimes went on, softly. "You're
1874 wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And,
1875 y'know, I ain't so sure myself..."
1877 He leaned forward, sighting between the dragon's ears, and his voice
1878 buzzed like a knife blade:
1880 "What you've got to ask yourself is: Am I feeling lucky?"
1882 They swayed backwards as he advanced.
1884 "Well?" he said. "/Are/ you feeling lucky?"
1886 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1888 # p. 154 (passage is a footnote; ten pages later, Sergeant Colon uses the
1889 # old version of the proverb)
1891 The phrase "Set a thief to catch a thief" had by this time (after strong
1892 representations from the Thieves' Guilde) replaced a much older and
1893 quintessentially Ankh-Morpork proverb, which was "Set a deep hole with
1894 spring-loaded sides, tripwires, whirling knife blades driven by water power,
1895 broken glass and scorpions, to catch a thief."
1897 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1899 # p. 174 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
1901 [...] There was no difference at all between the richest man and the
1902 poorest beggar, apart from the fact that the former had lots of money,
1903 food, power, fine clothes, and good health. But at least he wasn't
1904 any /better/. Just richer, fatter, more powerful, better dressed and
1905 healthier. It had been like that for hundreds of years.
1907 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1911 "Might have been just an innocent bystander, sir," said Carrot.
1913 "What, in Ankh-Morpork?"
1917 "We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value," said Vimes.
1919 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1921 # pp. 262-263 (passage is a footnote; 'practise', 'practised' are accurate)
1923 A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practised human sacrifice,
1924 except that they really didn't need to practise any more because they had
1925 got so good at it. City law said that only condemned criminals should be
1926 used, but that was all right because in most of the religions refusing to
1927 volunteer for sacrifice was an offense punishable by death.
1929 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1933 There were times when an ape had to do what a man had to do...
1935 The orangutan threw a complex salute and swung away into the darkness.
1937 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1939 # pp. 299-300 + 325 (final part comes quite a bit later; Carrot is trying to
1940 # alert oblivious Sergeant Colon that the dragon is coming)
1942 "This is what it comes to!" muttered Colon. "Decent women can't walk down
1943 the street without being eaten! Right, you bastards, you're... you're
1946 "Sergeant!" Carrot repeated urgently.
1948 "It's history, not geography," said Nobby. "That's what you're supposed to
1949 say. History. 'You're history!' you say."
1951 "Well, whatever," snapped Colon. "Let's see now--"
1953 [...(quite a while later)...]
1955 "You heard the Man," he rasped. "One false move and you're... you're--" he
1956 took a desparate stab at it--"you're Home Economics!"
1958 [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
1963 # The original publication of /Eric/ featured extensive illustrations by
1964 # Josh Kirby but the mass-market paperback edition contains none of them
1965 # and omits his name. In the Harper Torch edition, the list of other
1966 # books by the same auther has "Eric (with Josh Kirby)" even though the
1967 # copyright and title pages of that very book do not mention him.
1970 # pp. 3-4 (Harper Torch edition)
1972 No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, /technically/ they had,
1973 quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but
1974 somehow the puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they
1975 didn't own their own horses anymore, and within a couple of months they
1976 were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
1978 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
1982 "I can see blue sky!" said Eric. "Where do you think we'll come out?" he
1985 "Anywhere," said Rincewind. "Anytime."
1987 He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something
1988 of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he
1989 was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best.
1991 The next one was: I Thought You'd Like It.
1993 Eric was standing on: For The Sake Of The Children.
1995 'Weird, isn't it?' he said. 'Why do it like this?'
1997 'I think they're meant to be good intentions,' said Rincewind. This was a
1998 road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists.
2000 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2002 # pp. 9-10 (passage has an interesting start but not much of a finish...)
2004 "It's a haunting," he ventured. "Some short of ghost, maybe. A bell, book
2007 The Bursar sighed. "We tried that, Archchancellor."
2009 The Archchancellor leaned toward him.
2013 "I /said/, we tried that, Archchancellor," said the Bursar loudly,
2014 directing his voice at the old man's ear. "After dinner, you remember?
2015 We used Humptemper's /Names of the Ants/ and rang Old Tom."(1)
2017 "Did we, indeed. Worked, did it?"
2019 "/No/, Archchancellor."
2023 (1) Old Tom was the single cracked bronze bell in the University bell
2024 tower. The clapper dropped out shortly after it was cast, but the bell
2025 still tolled out some tremendously sonorous silences every hour.
2027 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2029 # pp. 14-15 (the top wizards have performed the Rite of AshkEnte)
2031 Death pointedly picked invisible particles off the edge of his scythe.
2033 The Archchancellor cupped a gnarled hand over his ear.
2035 "What'd he say? Who's the fella with the stick?"
2037 "It's Death, Archchancellor," said the Bursar patiently.
2041 "It's Death, sir. /You/ know."
2043 "Tell him we don't want any," said the old wizard, waving his stick.
2045 The Bursar sighed. "We summoned him, Archchancellor."
2047 "Is it? What'd we go and do that for? Bloody silly thing to do."
2049 The Bursar gave Death an embarrassed grin. He was on the point of asking
2050 him to excuse the Archchancellor on account of age, but realized that this
2051 would in the circumstances be a complete waste of breath.
2053 "Are we talking about the wizard Rincewind? The one with the--" the Bursar
2054 gave a shudder-- "horrible Luggage on legs? But he got blown up when there
2055 was all that business with the sourcerer, didn't he?"(1)
2057 INTO THE DUNGEON DIMENSIONS. AND NOW HE IS TRYING TO GET BACK HOME.
2059 (1) The Bursar was referring obliquely to the difficult occasion when the
2060 University very nearly caused the end of the world, and would in fact have
2061 done so had it not been for a chain of events involving Rincewind, a magic
2062 carpet and a half-brick in a sock. (See /Sourcery/.) The whole affair
2063 was very embarrassing to wizards, as it always is to people who find out
2064 afterward that they were on the wrong side all along,(2) and it is
2065 remarkable how many of the University's senior staff were now adamant that
2066 at the time they had been off sick, visiting their aunt, or doing research
2067 with the door locked while humming loudly and had had no idea of what was
2068 going on outside. There had been some desultory talk about putting up a
2069 statue to Rincewind but, by the curious alchemy that tends to apply in
2070 these sensitive issues, this quickly became a plaque, then a note on the
2071 Role of Honor, and finally a motion of censure for being improperly dressed.
2073 (2) ie, the one that lost.
2075 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2079 "Not that he was particularly successful. It was all a bit trial and
2082 "I thought you said great big scaly--"
2084 "Oh, /yes/. But that wasn't what he was after. He was trying to conjure
2085 up a succubus." It should be impossible to leer when all you've got is a
2086 beak, but the parrot managed it. "That's a female demon what comes in the
2087 night and makes mad passionate wossn--"
2089 "I've heard of them," said Rincewind. "Bloody dangerous things."
2091 The parrot put its head on one side. "It never worked. All he ever got
2096 "It's a demon that comes and has a headache at you."
2098 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2100 # p. 35 (passage is a footnote)
2102 Demons and their Hell are quite different from the Dungeon Dimensions,
2103 those endlass parallel wastelands outside space and time. The sad, mad
2104 Things in the Dungeon Dimensions have no understanding of the world but
2105 simply crave light and shape and try to warm themselves by the fires of
2106 reality, clustering around it with about the same effect--if they ever
2107 broke through--as an ocean trying to warm itself around a candle. Whereas
2108 demons belong to the same space-time wossname, more or less, as humans,
2109 and have a deep and abiding interest in humanity's day-to-day affairs.
2110 Interestingly enough, the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about
2111 judging the souls of the dead, so people can only go to hell if that's
2112 where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go.
2113 Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is
2114 important to shoot missionaries on sight.
2116 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2120 "Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure
2121 sign of a diseased mind."
2123 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2125 # pp. 178-179 (Ponce da Quirm, encoutered in hell)
2127 "So you didn't find the Fountain of Youth, then," he said, feeling that he
2128 should make some conversation.
2130 "Oh, but I did," said da Quirm earnestly. "A clear spring, deep in the
2131 jungle. It was very impressive. I had a good long drink, too. Or draft,
2132 which I think is the more appropriate word.
2134 "And--?" said Rincewind.
2136 "It definitely worked. Yes. For a while there I could definitely feel
2137 myself getting younger.
2139 "But--" Rincewind waved a vague hand to take in da Quirm, the treadmill,
2140 the towering circles of the Pit.
2142 "Ah," said the old man. "Of course, that's the really annoying bit. I'd
2143 read so much about the Fountain, and you'd have thought someone in all
2144 those books would have mentioned the really vital thing about the water,
2149 "/Boil it first./ Says it all, doesn't it? Terrible shame, really."
2151 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2155 The Luggage trotted down the great spiral road that linked the circles of
2156 the Pit. Even if conditions had been normal it probably would not have
2157 attracted much attention. If anything, it was rather less astonishing
2158 than most of the denizens.
2160 [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
2166 %title Moving Pictures (16)
2167 # p. 7 (ROC Edition)
2169 This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier.
2171 (Except that of course you can't have a /final/ frontier, because there'd
2172 be nothing for it to be a frontier /to/, but as frontiers go, it's pretty
2175 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2177 # pp. 22-23 (very short but happens to span a page boundary...)
2179 By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered
2180 so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.
2182 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2184 # pp. 44, 45, 46 (multiple paragraphs skipped in the first two gaps)
2186 He looked down. There was a dog sitting by his feet.
2188 It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically grey but with patches of
2189 brown, white, and black in outlying areas, and it was staring.
2191 It was certainly the most penetrating stare Victor had ever seen. It
2192 wasn't menacing, or fawning. It was just very slow and very thorough, as
2193 though the dog was memorising details so that it could give a full
2194 description to the authorities later.
2198 Victor let his gaze slide downwards. There was nothing there but the little
2199 dog, industriously scratching itself. It looked up slowly, and said "Woof?"
2203 Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have been a trick
2204 of an echo, or something. It wasn't that the dog had gone "woof!?, although
2205 that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe /never/
2206 went "woof!", they had complicated barks like "whuuugh!" and "hwhoouf!".
2207 No, it was that it hadn't in fact /barked/ at all. It had /said/ "woof".
2211 One of the last things Victor remembered was a voice beside his knee saying,
2212 "Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said 'miaow'."
2214 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2218 "'Twas beauty killed the beast," said the Dean, who liked to say things
2221 "No it wasn't," said the Chair. "It was it splatting into the ground like
2224 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2228 There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld
2231 At least, there's a /saying/ that there's a saying that all roads lead to
2234 And it's wrong. All roads lead /away/ from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes
2235 people just walk along them the wrong way.
2237 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2239 # p. 34 (Victor Tugelbend and Ponder Stibbons are students at Unseen Uni.)
2241 "Rain's stopped. Let's go over the wall," he said. "We deserve a drink."
2243 Victor waggled a finger. "Just one drink, then. Got to keep sober," he
2244 said. "It's Finals tomorrow. Got to keep a clear head!"
2246 "Huh!", said Ponder.
2248 Of course, it's very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many
2249 worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-
2250 playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this
2253 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2257 In a sense which his tutors couldn't quite define, much to their annoyance,
2258 Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world.
2260 Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of
2261 effort. Victor had passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight
2262 through commonplace idleness and out on the far side. He put more effort
2263 into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour.
2265 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2269 Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler was one of those rare people with the ability to
2270 think in straight lines.
2272 Most people think in curves and zig-zags. For example, they start with a
2273 thought like: I wonder how I can become very rich, and then proceed along
2274 an uncertain course which includes thoughts like: I wonder what's for
2275 supper, and: I wonder who I know that can lend me five dollars?
2277 Whereas Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the
2278 other end of the process, in this case /I am now very rich/, draw a line
2279 between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently,
2280 until he got to the other end.
2282 Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw
2283 in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of
2284 people to buy what he had to sell.
2286 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2290 "Tell me, Mr Dibbler." said Silverfish, "what exactly is your profession?"
2292 "I sell merchandise," said Dibbler.
2294 "Mostly sausages," Victor volunteered.
2296 "/And/ merchandise," said Dibbler, sharply. "I only sell sausages when the
2297 merchandising trade is a bit slow."
2299 "And the sale of sausages leads you to believe you can make better moving
2300 pictures?" said Silverfish. "Anyone can sell sausages! Isn't that so,
2303 "Well..." said Victor, reluctantly. No-one except Dibbler could possibly
2304 sell Dibbler's sausages.
2306 "There you are then," said Silverfish.
2308 "The thing is," said Victor, "that Mr Dibbler can even sell sausages to
2309 people who have bought them off him /before/."
2311 "That's right!" said Dibbler. He beamed at Victor.
2313 "And a man who could sell Mr Dibbler's sausages twice could sell anything,"
2316 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2318 # pp. 111-112 ('dis', 'ort', 'yore', 'finking', 'mayonnaisey', 'specialitay',
2319 # 'de lar mayson' all accurate)
2321 Borgle's commissary had decided to experiment with salads tonight. The
2322 nearest salad growing district was thirty slow miles away.
2324 "What dis?" demanded a troll, holding up something limp and brown.
2326 Fruntkin the short-order chef hazarded a guess.
2328 'Celery?" he said. He peered closer. "Yeah, celery."
2332 "'S'right. 'S'right! Ripe celery ort to be brown," said Fruntkin, quickly.
2333 "Shows it's ripe," he added.
2335 "It should be /green/."
2337 "Nah. Yore finking about the tomatoes," said Fruntkin.
2339 "Yeah, and what's this runny stuff?" said a man in the queue.
2341 Fruntkin drew himself up to his full height.
2343 "That," he said, "is the mayonnaisey. Made it myself. Out of a /book/, he
2346 "Yead, I expect you did," said the man, prodding it. "Clearly oil, eggs
2347 and vinegar were not involved, right?"
2349 "Specialitay de lar mayson," said Fruntkin.
2351 "Right, right," said the man. "Only it's attacking my lettuce."
2353 Fruntkin grasped his ladle angrily.
2357 "No, it's all right," said the prospective diner. "The slugs have formed a
2360 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2362 # p. 137 (CMOT Dibbler has become a director, Rock is a troll actor)
2364 "Er, I was just wondering, Mr Dibbler... what is my motivation for this
2369 "Yes. Er. I got to know, see," said Rock.
2371 "How about: I'll fire you if you don't do it properly?"
2373 Rock grinned. "Right you are, Mr Dibbler," he said.
2375 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2379 Magic wasn't difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque
2380 edifice or wizardry had been set up to conceal. Anyone with a bit of
2381 intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the
2382 wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
2384 The trick was to do magic and /get away with it/.
2386 Because it was as if the human race was a field of corn and magic helped
2387 the users grow just that bit taller, so that they stood out. That
2388 attracted the attention of gods and--Victor hesitated--other Things outside
2389 this world. People who used magic without knowing what they were doing
2390 usually came to a sticky end.
2392 All over the entire room, sometimes.
2394 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2396 # p. 204 (passage ends mid-paragraph; musings are by Gaspode the dog)
2398 Sunnink dreadful in there, he thought. Prob'ly tentacled fings that rips
2399 your face off. I mean, when you finds mysterious doors in old hills, it
2400 stands to reason wot comes out ain't going to be pleased to see you. Evil
2401 creatures wot Man shouldn't wot of, and here's one dog wot don't want to
2404 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2406 # pp. 206-207 (passage starts mid-paragraph; Dibbler now controls Silverfish's
2407 # moving pictures studio; Detritus isn't part of the Watch yet)
2409 "[...] Detritus, throw this bum out!"
2411 "Right you are, Mr Dibbler," rumbled the troll, gripping Silverfish's
2414 "You haven't heard the last of this, you--you scheming, devious
2417 Dibbler removed his cigar.
2419 "That's /Mister/ Megalomanic to you," he said.
2421 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2423 # p. 274 (passage starts mid-sentence; senior wizards of the University are
2424 # attending a 'click' and have decided to take their hats off...)
2426 [...] inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
2428 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2430 # p. 295 (passage starts mid-sentence; the movie theater owner's daughter
2431 # is playing a pipe organ to accompany the silent movie)
2433 [...] whatever piece of music she was playing, it was definitely losing.
2435 [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
2441 %title Reaper Man (15)
2442 # pp. 301-302 (ROC edition)
2444 It was later that the story of Windle Poons really came to an end, if
2445 "story" means all that he did and caused and set in motion. In the Ramtop
2446 villages where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe
2447 that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die
2448 away--until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has
2449 finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span
2450 of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existance.
2452 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2454 # p. 251 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
2456 Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
2458 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2460 # p. 305 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
2462 Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter
2463 how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first,
2464 and is waiting for it.
2466 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2470 "That's not fair, you know. If we knew when we were going to die, people
2471 would lead better lives."
2473 IF PEOPLE KNEW WHEN THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, I THINK THEY PROBABLY WOULDN'T
2476 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2482 "It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always... it's just that life
2483 is a habit that's hard to break..."
2485 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2489 Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it
2490 necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know
2491 they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in
2492 a well-organized universe, but they wouldn't see the point of /believing/,
2493 of going around saying, "O great table, without whom we are as naught".
2494 Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only
2495 as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the
2496 whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
2498 Nevertheless, there is a small chaple off the University's Great Hall,
2499 because while the wizards stand right behind the philosophy as outlined
2500 above, you don't become a successful wizard by getting up gods' noses even
2501 if those noses only exist in an ethereal or metaphorical sense. Because
2502 while wizards don't belive in gods they know for a fact that /gods/ believe
2505 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2507 # p. 50 (Dibbler is so low because he's on steps leading down to a cellar)
2511 Colon froze. Then he looked down. A face was staring up at him from ground
2512 level. When he'd got a grip on himself, he made out the sharp features of
2513 his old friend Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, the Discworld's walking, talking
2514 argument in favour of the theory that mankind had descended from a species
2515 of rodent. C. M. O. T. Dibbler like to describe himself as a merchant
2516 adventurer; everyone else liked to describe him as itinerant pedlar whose
2517 moneymaking schemes were always let down by some small but vital flaw, such
2518 as trying to sell things he didn't own or which didn't work or, sometimes,
2519 didn't even exist. Fairy gold is well known to evaporate by morning, but
2520 it was a reinforced concrete slab by comparison to some of Dibbler's
2523 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2527 Over the fireplace was an ornamental candlestick, fixed to a bracket on the
2528 wall. It was such a familiar piece of furniture that Windle hadn't really
2529 seen it for fifty years.
2531 It was coming unscrewed. It spun around slowly, squeaking once a turn.
2532 After half a dozen turns it fell off and clattered to the floor.
2534 Inexplicable phenomena were not in themselves unusual on the Discworld.(1)
2535 It was just that they normally had more point, or at least were a bit more
2538 (1) Rains of fish, for example, were so common in the little land-locked
2539 village of Pine Dressers that it had a flourishing smoking, canning and
2540 kipper filleting industry. And in the mountain regions of Syrrit many
2541 sheep, left out in the fields all night, would be found in the morning to
2542 /be facing the other way/, without the apparent intervention of any human
2545 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2547 # pp. 68-69 (130 year old wizard Windle Poon has become a zombie after dying)
2549 "And now let's put the lid on and go and have some lunch," said Ridcully.
2550 "Don't worry, Windle. It's bound to work. Today is the last day of the
2553 Windle lay in the darkness, listening to the hammering. There was a thump
2554 and a muffled imprecation against the Dean for not holding the end properly.
2555 And then the patter of soil on the lid, getting fainter and more distant.
2557 After a while a distant rumbling suggested that the commerce of the city
2558 was being resumed. He could even hear muffled voices.
2560 He banged on the coffin lid.
2562 "Can you keep it down?" he demanded. "There's people down here trying to
2565 He heard the voices stop. There was the sound of feet hurrying away.
2567 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2569 # pp. 81-82 (things have stopped dying because Death is no longer on the job)
2571 Everything that exists, yearns to live. That's what the cycle of life is
2572 all about. That's the engine that drives the great biological pumps of
2573 evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or
2574 tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the
2575 very top--which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all the
2578 Everything that exists, yearns to live. Even things that are not alive.
2579 Things that have a kind of sub-life, a metaphorical life, an /almost/ life.
2580 And now, in the same way that a sudden hot spell brings forth unnatural and
2583 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2587 Dead. That was the point. All the religions had very strong views about
2588 talking to the dead. And so did Mrs Cake. They held that it was sinful.
2589 Mrs Cake held that it was only common courtesy.
2591 This usually led to a fierce ecclesiastical debate which resulted in Mrs
2592 Cake giving the chief priest what she called "a piece of her mind". There
2593 were so many pieces of Mrs Cake's mind left around the city now that it
2594 was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs Cake but,
2595 strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there
2598 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2602 "No--" Ridcully began, and realised that it was hopeless. And he was losing
2603 the initiative. He carefully formulated the most genteel battle cry in the
2604 history of bowdlerism,
2606 "Darn them to Heck!" he yelled, and ran after the Dean.
2608 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2612 Miss Flitworth disappeared into the scullery. There was the creaking of a
2613 pump. She returned with a damp flannel and a glass of water.
2615 THERE'S A NEWT IN IT!
2617 "Shows it's fresh," said Miss Flitworth,(1) fishing the amphibian out and
2618 releasing it on the flagstones, where it scuttled away into a crack.
2620 (1) People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean
2621 that the water's fresh and drinkable, and /in all that time/ never asked
2622 themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.
2624 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2628 "Have you got any last words?"
2630 YES. I DON'T WANT TO GO.
2632 "Well. Succinct, anyway."
2634 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2638 "Where's everyone gone, Librarian?"
2642 "Just like them. I'd have done that. Rush off without thinking. May the
2643 gods bless them and help them, if they can find the time from their family
2646 And then he thought: well, what now? I've thought, and what am I going to
2649 Rush off, or course, But slowly.
2651 [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
2657 %title Witches Abroad (14)
2658 # p. 92 (ROC edition)
2660 Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never
2661 managed it from the cat.
2663 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2667 Desiderata Hollow was making her will.
2669 When Desiderata Hollow was a girl, her grandmother had given her four
2670 important pieces of advice to guide her young footsteps on the unexpectedly
2671 twisting pathway of life.
2675 Never trust a dog with orange eyebrows,
2677 Always get the young man's name and address,
2679 Never get between two mirrors,
2681 And always wear completely clean underwear every day because you never knew
2682 when you were going to be knocked down and killed by a runaway horse and if
2683 people found you had unsatisfactory underwear on, you'd die of shame.
2685 And then Desiderata grew up to become a witch. And one of the minor
2686 benefits of being a witch is that you know exactly when you're going to die
2687 and can wear what underwear you like.(1)
2689 That had been eighty years earlier, when the idea of knowing exactly when
2690 you were going to die had seemed quite attractive because secretly, of
2691 course, you knew you were going to live forever.
2697 Forever didn't seem to last as long these days as once it did.
2699 (1) Which explains a lot about witches.
2701 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2703 # p. 64 (passage ends mid-paragraph)
2705 "You know," said Nanny, investigating the recesses of the basket, "whenever
2706 I deals with dwarfs, the phrase 'Duck's arse' swims across my mind."
2708 "Mean little devils. You should see the prices they tries to charge me
2709 when I takes my broom to be repaired," said Granny.
2711 "Yes, but you never pay," said Magrat.
2713 "That's not the point," said Granny Weatherwax. "They shouldn't be allowed
2714 to charge that sort of money. That's thievin', that is."
2716 "I don't see how it can be thieving if you don't pay anyway," said Magrat.
2718 "I never pay for anything," said Granny. [...]
2720 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2722 # p. 93 (passage is a footnote)
2724 Nanny Ogg sent a number of cards home to her family, not a single one of
2725 which got back before she did. This is traditional, and happens everywhere
2728 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2730 # pp. 118-119 (Magrat has been teaching herself martial arts via books)
2732 "Lobsang Dibbler says sometimes you have to lose in order to win," said
2735 "Sounds daft to me," said Nanny. "That's Yen Buddhism, is it?"
2737 "No. They're the ones who say you have to have lots of money to win," said
2738 Magrat.(1) "In the Path of the Scorpion, the way to win is to lose every
2739 fight except the last one. You use the enemy's strength against himself."
2741 "What, you get him to hit himself, sort of thing?" said Nanny. "Sounds
2744 (1) The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They
2745 hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and burden to the soul.
2746 They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant
2747 duty to acquire as much as possible to reduce the risk to innocent people.
2749 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2753 They had breakfast in a forest clearing. It was grilled pumpkin. The dwarf
2754 bread was brought out for inspection. But it was miraculous, the dwarf
2755 bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid.
2756 You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of
2757 dozens of things you'd rather eat. Your boots for example. Mountains. Raw
2758 sheep. Your own foot.
2760 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2762 # pp. 194-195 ("he just" is accurate; cockerel == adolescent rooster)
2764 "This is Legba, a dark and dangerous spirit," said Mrs. Gogol. She leaned
2765 closer and spoke out of the corner of her mouth. "Between you and me, he
2766 just a big black cockerel. But you know how it is."
2768 "It pays to advertise," Nanny agreed. "This is Greebo. Between you and me,
2769 he's a fiend from hell."
2771 "Well, he's a cat," said Mrs. Gogol, generously. "It's only to be expected."
2773 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2777 "/And/ still a bit of the wedding cake," said the first coachman. "Ain't
2778 you et that up yet?"
2780 "We have it every night," said the undercoachman.
2782 The shed shook with the ensuing laughter. It is a universal fact that any
2783 innocent comment made by any recently married young member of any workforce
2784 is an instant trigger for coarse merriment among his or her older and more
2785 cynical colleagues. This happens even if everyone concerned has nine legs
2786 and lives at the bottom of an ocean of ammonia on a huge cold planet. It's
2787 just one of those things.
2789 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2793 "You ought to be more adventurous, Granny," said Magrat.
2795 "I ain't against adventure, in moderation," said Granny, "but not when I'm
2798 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2800 # pp. 263-264 (Nanny is trying to stop an elaborate clock; despite damage
2801 # inflicted on it, it goes on to announce midnight [early])
2803 Let's see thought Nanny. This bit is connected to that bit, this one turns,
2804 that one turns /faster/, this spiky bit wobbles backwards and forwards...
2806 Oh, well. Just twist the first thing you can grab, as the High Priest said
2807 to the vestal virgin.(1)
2809 Nanny Ogg spat on her hands, gripped the largest cog-wheel, and twisted.
2811 It carried on turning, pulling her with it.
2815 Then she did was neither Granny Weatherwax nor Magrat would have dreamed of
2816 doing in the circumstances. But Nanny Ogg's voyages on the sea of
2817 intersexual dalliance had gone rather further than twice around the
2818 lighthouse, and she saw nothing demeaning in getting a man to help her.
2820 She simpered at Casanunda.
2822 "Things would be a lot more comfortable in our little /pie-de-terre/ if you
2823 could just push this little wheel around a bit," she said. "I'm sure /you/
2824 could manage it," she added.
2826 "Oh, no problem, good lady," said Casanunda. He reached up with one hand.
2827 Dwarfs are immensely strong for their size. The wheel seemed to offer him
2828 no resistance at all.
2830 Somewhere in the mechanism something resisted for a moment and then went
2831 /clonk/. Big wheels turned reluctantly. Little wheels screamed on their
2832 axles. A small important piece flew out and pinged off of Casanunda's
2835 And, much faster than nature had ever intended, the hands sped around the
2838 (1) This is the last line to a Discworld joke lost, alas, to posterity.
2840 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2842 # p. 265 ('pate' has a couple of accent marks which can't be rendered in ascii)
2844 There are various forms of voodoo in the multiverse, because it's a
2845 religion that can be put together from any ingredients that happen to be
2846 lying around. And all of them try, in some way, to call a god into the body
2849 That was stupid, Mrs. Gogol thought. That was dangerous.
2851 Mrs. Gogol's voodoo worked the other way about. What was a god? A focus of
2852 belief. If people believed, a god began to grow. Feebly at first, but if
2853 the swamp taught anything, it taught patience. Anything could be the focus
2854 of a god. A handful of feathers with a red ribbon around them, a hat and
2855 coat on a couple of sticks... anything. Because when all people had was
2856 practically nothing, then anything could be almost everything. And then you
2857 fed it, and lulled it, like a goose heading for pate, and let the power grow
2858 very slowly, and when the time was ripe you opened the path... backwards.
2859 A human could ride the god, rather than the other way around. There would
2860 be a price to pay later, but there always was. In Mrs. Gogol's experience,
2861 everyone ended up dying.
2863 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2865 # p. 270 (Greebo has been temporarily transformed--polymorphed?--into a human)
2867 Greebo wasn't a happy cat. [...]
2869 Then he'd smelled the kitchen. Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks
2870 gravitate to gravity.
2872 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2874 # p. 282 (Casanunda the dwarf is Discworld's Casanova; he appears again in
2875 # /Lords and Ladies/)
2877 "How come you're in the palace guard, Casanunda?"
2879 "Soldier of fortune takes whatever jobs are going, Mrs. Ogg," said Casanunda
2882 "But all the rest of 'em are six foot tall and you're--of the shorter
2885 "I lied about my height, Mrs. Ogg. I'm a world-famous liar."
2891 "What about you being the world's greatest lover?"
2893 There was silence for a while.
2895 "Well, maybe I'm only No. 2," said Casanunda. "But I try harder."
2897 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2899 # pp. 285-286 (Greebo is still in human form)
2903 Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill, but to win. There is a
2904 difference. There's no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won't
2905 know they've lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who
2906 is beaten and knows it. There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten
2907 opponent, who will remain beaten every day for the remainder of their sad
2908 and wretched life, is something to treasure.
2910 Cats do not, of course, rationise this far. They just like to send someone
2911 limping off minus a tail and a few square inches of fur.
2913 Greebo's technique was unscientific and wouldn't have stood a chance against
2914 any decent swordsmanship, but on his side was the fact that it is almost
2915 impossible to develop decent swordsmanship when you seem to have run into a
2916 food mixer that is biting your ear off.
2918 The witches watched with interest.
2920 "I think we can leave him now," said Nanny. "I think he's having fun."
2922 [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
2928 %title Small Gods (12)
2930 He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.
2932 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
2935 Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation
2938 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
2940 # p. 3 (Harper Torch edition)
2942 So history has its caretakers.
2944 They live ... well, in the nature of things they live wherever they are
2945 sent, but their /spiritual/ home is in a hidden valley in the high Ramtops
2946 of the Discworld, where the books of history are kept.
2948 These aren't books in which the events of the past are pinned like so many
2949 butterflies to a cork. These are the books from which history in derived.
2950 There are more than twenty thousand of them, each one is ten feet high,
2951 bound in lead, and the letters are so small that they have to be read with
2954 When people say "It is written ..." it is written /here/.
2956 There are fewer metaphors than people think.
2958 Every month the abbot and two senior monks go into the cave where the
2959 books are kept. It used to be the duty of the abbot alone, but two other
2960 reliable monks were included after the unfortunate case of the 59th Abbot,
2961 who made a million dollars in small bets before his fellow monks caught up
2964 Besides, it's dangerous to go in alone. The sheer concentratedness of
2965 History, sleeting past soundlessly out into the world, can be overwhelming.
2966 Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
2968 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
2972 It was the Year of the Notional Serpent, or two hundred years after the
2973 Declaration of the Prophet Abbys.
2975 Which meant that the time of the 8th Prophet was imminent.
2977 That was the reliable thing about the Church of the Great God Om. It had
2978 very punctual prophets. You could set your calendar by them, if you had
2981 And, as is generally the case around the time a prophet is expected, the
2982 Church redoubled its efforts to be holy. This was very much like the
2983 bustle you get in any large concern when the auditors are expected, but
2984 tended towards taking people suspected of being less holy and putting them
2985 to death in a hundred ingenious ways. This is considered a reliable
2986 barometer of the state of one's piety in most of the really popular
2987 religions. There's a tendency to declare that there is more backsliding
2988 around than in the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be
2989 torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, and
2990 that it's time to wipe the slate clean. Blood is generally considered
2991 very efficient for this purpose.
2993 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
2995 # p. 60 ("he" is a tortoise, unnoticed among a large crowd of people)
2997 He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet. He had
2998 no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly
2999 because he was thinking. Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the
3002 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3004 # p. 60 (same page as preceding passage)
3006 There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended
3007 largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and
3008 exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success
3009 in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God,
3010 because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His
3011 /disapproval/. In the same way, the Quisition could act without
3012 possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else?
3013 The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds
3014 of His exquisitors unless it was /right/ that it should be there. Life
3015 could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes
3018 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3020 # p. 92 ([sic] first paragraph ought to have fourth '.' to end sentence)
3022 The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is. And now,
3023 you can think clearly ...
3025 There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in
3026 all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.
3028 What have I always believed?
3030 That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not
3031 according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent
3032 and honest /inside/, then it would, in the end, more or less, turn out
3035 You couldn't get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already.
3037 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3041 Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick
3042 as thin soup. Brutha knocked.
3046 (1) Words are the litmus paper of the mind. If you find yourself in the
3047 power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go
3048 somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter," don't stop to pack.
3050 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3052 # p. 141 (at the end, Xeno is almost certainly agreeing with Ibid, but
3053 # he /might/ be answering Brutha's last question)
3055 "Are you all philosophers?" said Brutha.
3057 The one called Xeno stepped forward, adjusting the hang of his toga.
3059 "That's right," he said. "We're philosophers. We think, therefore we am."
3061 "Are," said the luckless paradox manufacturer automatically.
3063 Xeno spun around. "I've just about had it up to /here/ with you, Ibid!" he
3064 roared. He turned back to Brutha. "We /are/, therefore we am," he said
3065 confidently. "That's it."
3067 Several of the philosophers looked at one another with interest.
3069 "That's actually quite interesting," one said. "The evidence of our
3070 existence is the /fact/ of our existence, is that what you're saying?"
3072 "Shut up," said Xeno, without looking around.
3074 "Have you been fighting?" said Brutha.
3076 The assembled philosophers assumed various expressions of shock and horror.
3078 "Fighting? Us? We're /philosophers/," said Ibid, shocked.
3080 "My word, yes," said Xeno.
3082 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3086 All over the world there were rulers with titles like the Exalted, the
3087 Supreme, and Lord High Something or Other. Only in one small country was
3088 the ruler elected by the people, who could remove him whenever they
3089 wanted--and they called him the Tyrant.
3091 The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote.(1) Every five
3092 years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he
3093 was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he
3094 was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal
3095 madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher
3096 in the street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected
3097 another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent
3098 people kept on making the same mistakes.
3100 (1) Provided that we wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of
3101 being mad, frivolous, or a woman.
3103 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3107 "I still don't see how one god can be a hundred different thunder gods.
3108 They all look different ..."
3114 "And different voices. I happen to know Io's got seventy different hammers.
3115 Not common knowledge, that. And it's just the same with mother goddesses.
3116 There's only one of 'em. She just got a lot of wigs and of course it's
3117 amazing what you can do with a padded bra."
3119 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3123 An hour later the lion, who was limping after Brutha, also arrived at the
3124 grave. It had lived in the desert for sixteen years, and the reason it had
3125 lived so long was that it had not died, and it had not died because it
3126 never wasted handy protein. It dug.
3128 Humans have always wasted handy protein ever since they started wondering
3129 who had lived in it.
3131 But, on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion.
3133 [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
3139 %title Lords and Ladies (12)
3140 # p. 122 (Harper Torch edition)
3142 Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
3143 Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
3144 Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
3145 Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
3146 Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
3147 Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
3149 The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake,
3150 and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have
3151 changed their meaning.
3153 No one ever said elves are nice.
3157 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3161 "Hope she does all right as queen," said Nanny.
3163 "We taught her everything she knows," said Granny Weatherwax.
3165 "Yeah," said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. "D'you
3166 think... maybe... ?"
3170 "D'you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything /we/ know?"
3172 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3176 It was very hard, being a reader in Invisible Writings.(1)
3178 (1) The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by
3179 the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic
3180 mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books,
3181 everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire
3182 other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past.
3183 But the General Theory(2) of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the
3184 contents of books /as yet unwritten/ can be deduced from books now in
3187 (2) There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much
3188 because it's self-evidently a load of marsh gas.
3190 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3194 "Don't hold with schools," said Granny Weatherwax. "They get in the way
3195 of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There's too
3196 much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young, I
3199 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3203 The highwayman stepped over the groaning body of the driver and marched
3204 toward the door of the coach, dragging his stepladder behind him.
3208 "Your money or, I'm sorry to say, your--"
3210 A blast of octarine fire blew his hat off.
3212 The dwarf's expression did not change.
3214 "I wonder if I might be allowed to rephrase my demands?"
3216 Ridcully looked the elegantly dressed stranger up and down, or rather
3217 down and further down.
3219 "You don't look like a dwarf," he said, "apart from the height, that is."
3221 "Don't look like a dwarf apart from the height?"
3223 I mean, the helmet and iron boots department is among those you are lacking
3226 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3232 There is the wizards' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on
3233 the age of the wizard. Older wizards talk about candles, circles, planets,
3234 stars, bananas, chants, runes, and the importance of having at least four
3235 good meals every day. Younger wizards, particularly the pale ones who
3236 spend most of their time in the High Energy Magic building,(1) chatter at
3237 length about fluxes in the morphic nature of the universe, the essentially
3238 impermanent quality of even the most apparently rigid time-space framework,
3239 the impossibility of reality, and so on: what this means is that they have
3240 got hold of something hot and are gabbling the physics as they go along.
3242 (1) It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest
3243 possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to made up of
3244 /resons/(2) or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each
3245 reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five "flavors,"
3246 known as "up," "down," "sideways," "sex appeal," and "peppermint."
3248 (2) Lit: "Thing-ies."
3250 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3256 Then there is the witches' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending
3257 on the age of the witch. Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but
3258 may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn't know what the
3259 hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities,
3260 and could become any of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty
3261 was inserted in the crack and /twisted/; that, if you really had to make
3262 someone's hat explode, all you needed to do was /twist/ into the universe
3263 where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce
3264 off in different directions.
3266 Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe
3267 it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers
3270 Everyone may to right, all at the same time. That's the thing about
3273 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3275 # p. 114; 'colorful' & 'humor' are spelled the American way, 'or' not 'our'
3277 He knocked on the coach door. The window slid down.
3279 "I wouldn't like you to think of this as a robbery," he said. "I'd like
3280 you to think of it more as a colorful anecdote you might enjoy telling your
3281 grandchildren about."
3283 A voice from within said, "That's him! He stole my horse!"
3285 A wizard's staff poked out. The chieftain saw the knob on the end.
3287 "Now then," he said pleasantly. "I know the rules. Wizards aren't allowed
3288 to use magic against civilians except in genuine life-threatening situa--"
3290 There was a burst of octarine light.
3292 "Actually, it's not a rule," said Ridcully. "It's more a guideline." He
3293 turned to Ponder Stibbons. "Interestin' use of Stacklady's Morphic
3294 Resonator here, I hoped you noticed."
3298 The chieftain had been turned into a pumpkin, although, in accordance with
3299 the rules of universal humor, he still had his hat on.
3301 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3303 # p. 149 (second half of a paragraph)
3305 Things had to balance. You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad
3306 witch. It never worked for long. All you could try to be was a /witch/,
3307 as hard as you could.
3309 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3311 # p. 162 (mid-paragraph)
3313 "I'm the head wizard now. I've only got to give an order and a thousand
3314 wizards will... uh... disobey, come to think of it, or say 'What?', or
3315 start to argue. But they have to take notice.
3317 "I've been to that University a few times," said Granny. "A bunch of fat
3320 "That's right! That's /them/!"
3322 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3326 The window was no escape this time. There was the bed to hide under, and
3327 that'd work for all of two seconds, wouldn't it?
3329 Her eye was drawn by some kind of horrible magic back to the room's
3330 garderobe, lurking behind its curtain.
3332 Margrat lifted the lid. The shaft was definitely wide enough to admit a
3333 body. Garderobes were notorious in that respect. Several unpopular kings
3334 met their end, as it were, in the garderobe, at the hands of an assassin
3335 with good climbing ability, a spear, and a fundamental approach to politics.
3337 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3339 # p. 191 ('a' historian, not 'an'; 'Ynci' is correct)
3341 Some shape, some trick of moonlight, some expression on a painted face
3342 somehow cut through her terror and caught her eye.
3344 That was a portrait she'd never seen before. She'd never walked down this
3345 far. The idiot vapidity of the assembled queens had depressed her. But
3348 Ths one, somehow, reached out to her.
3352 It couldn't have been done from life. In the days of /this/ queen, the
3353 only paint known locally was a sort of blue, and generally used on the body.
3354 But a few generations ago King Lully I had been a bit of a historian and a
3355 romantic. He'd researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and
3356 where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions
3357 of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom(1)
3358 and extrapolated from associated sources(2). He'd commissioned the
3359 portrait of Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered, one of the founders of the
3364 (2) Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
3366 [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
3372 %title Men at Arms (14)
3374 The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it.
3376 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3378 # pp. 6-7 (Harper Torch edition)
3380 Ankh-Morpork had a king again.
3382 And this was /right/. And it was /fate/ that let Edward recognize this
3383 /just/ when he'd got his Plan. And it was /right/ that it was /Fate/,
3384 and the city would be /Saved/ from its ignoble present by its /glorius/
3385 past. He had the /Means/, and he had the /end/. And so on ...
3386 Edward's thoughts often ran like this.
3388 He could think in /italics/. Such people need watching.
3390 Preferably from a safe distance.
3392 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3396 There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally
3397 religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without
3398 warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the
3399 need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat.
3400 Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice
3401 to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded
3402 kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their
3403 other armpit and shout, "Oh, random fluctuations-in-the-space-time-
3404 continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!"
3406 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3408 # p. 119 (perhaps a bit subtle; it would be clearer if 'they' was italicized)
3410 "It's an ancient tradition," said Carrot.
3412 "I thought dwarfs didn't believe in devils and demons and stuff like
3415 "That's true, but ... we're not sure if they know."
3419 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3421 # pp. 168-169 (treacle == molasses)
3423 "I'd like a couple of eggs," said Vimes, "with the yolks real hard but
3424 the whites so runny that they drip like treacle. And I want bacon, that
3425 special bacon all covered with bony nodules and dangling bits of fat.
3426 And a slice of fried bread. The kind that makes your arteries go clang
3427 just by looking at it."
3429 "Tough order," said Harga.
3431 "You managed it yesterday. And give me some more coffee. Black as
3432 midnight on a moonless night."
3434 Harga looked surprised. That wasn't like Vimes.
3436 "How black's that, then?" he said.
3438 "Oh pretty damn black, I should think."
3444 "You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up
3445 more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night."
3449 "An /overcast/ moonless night?" he said.
3451 Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.
3453 "Cumulous or cirro-nimbus?"
3455 "I'm sorry. What did you say?"
3457 "You gets city lights reflected off cumulous, because it's low lying, see.
3458 Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in--"
3460 "A moonless night," said Vimes, in a hollow voice, "that is as black as
3465 "And a doughnut." Vimes grabbed Harga's stained vest and pulled him
3466 until they were nose to nose. "A doughnut as doughnutty as a doughnut
3467 made of flour, water, one large egg, sugar, a pinch of yeast, cinnamon
3468 to taste and a jam, jelly, or rat filling depending on national or
3469 species preference, OK? Not as doughnutty as something in any way
3470 metaphorical. Just a doughnut. One doughnut."
3476 "You only had to say."
3478 Harge brushed off his vest, gave Vimes a hurt look, and went back into
3481 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3483 # p. 174 (clumsy wording; 'they' in 2nd sentence != 'they' in 1st sentence)
3485 Why had they chased someone halfway across the city? Because they'd
3486 run away. /No one/ ran away from the Watch. Thieves just flashed their
3487 licenses. Unlicensed thieves had nothing to fear from the Watch, since
3488 they'd saved up all their fear for the Thieves' Guild. Assassins always
3489 obeyed the letter of the law. And honest men didn't run away from the
3490 Watch.(1) Running away from the Watch was downright suspicious.
3492 (1) The axiom "Honest men have nothing to fear from the police" is
3493 currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board.
3495 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3497 # pp. 176-177 ("this [sic; no 'is'] the pork futures warehouse")
3499 "Oh, my," said Detritus. "I think this the pork futures warehouse in
3504 "Used to work here," said the troll. "Used to work everywhere. Go away,
3505 you stupid troll, you too thick," he added, gloomily.
3507 "Is there any way out?"
3509 "The main door is in Morpork Street. But no one comes in here for months.
3510 Till pork exists."(1)
3514 (1) Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things
3515 which only exist /in potentia/, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-
3516 Morpork is a product of the Patrician's rules about baseless metaphors,
3517 the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must
3518 exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality
3519 around Ankh, which is so thin that it's as thin as a very thin thing.
3520 The net result is that trading in pork futures--in pork /that doesn't
3521 exist yet/--led to the building of the warehouse to store it until it
3522 does. The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in
3523 the temporal energy flow. At least, that's what the wizards in the
3524 High Energy Magic building say. And they've got proper pointy hats and
3525 letters after their name, so they know what they're talking about.
3527 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3531 Black mud, more or less dry, made a path at the bottom of the tunnel.
3532 There was slime on the walls, too, indicating that at some point in the
3533 recent past the tunnel had been full of water. Here and there huge
3534 patches of fungi, luminous with decay, cast a faint glow over the
3535 ancient stonework.(1)
3537 (1) It didn't need to. Cuddy, belonging to a race that worked underground
3538 for preference, and Detritus, a member of a race notoriously nocturnal,
3539 had excellent vision in the dark. But mysterious caves and tunnels
3540 always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch
3541 merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in
3542 and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.
3544 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3548 "He's bound to have done /something/," Noddy repeated.
3550 In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If
3551 there was a crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal
3552 should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy
3553 accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was
3554 undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, /in general
3555 terms/, justice was done.
3557 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3561 The librarian considered matters for a while. So ... a dwarf and a troll.
3562 He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were
3563 great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of
3564 reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There
3565 was something, well, /sacrilegious/ about the way they kept taking books
3566 off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked
3567 people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in
3568 the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature
3569 intended them to be.
3571 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3575 Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
3577 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3579 # p. 265 (fyi, they're decorated chicken eggs)
3581 "All those little heads ... "
3583 They stretched away in the candlelight, shelf on shelf of them, tiny
3584 little clown faces--as if a tribe of headhunters had suddenly developed
3585 a sophisicated sense of humor and a desire to make the world a better
3588 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3592 "You know what I mean!"
3594 "Can't say I do. Can't say I do. Clothing has never been what you might
3595 call a thingy of dog wossname." Gaspode scratched his ear. "Two meta-
3596 syntactic variables there. Sorry."
3598 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3602 "Hahaha, a nice day for it!" leered the Bursar.
3604 "Oh dear," said Ridcully, "he's off again. Can't understand the man.
3605 Anyone got the dried frog pills?"
3607 It was a complete mystery to Mustrum Ridcully, a man designed by nature to
3608 live outdoors and happily slaughter anything that coughed in the bushes,
3609 why the Bursar (a man designed by Nature to sit in a small room somewhere,
3610 adding up figures) was so nervous. He'd tried all sorts of things to, as
3611 he put it, buck him up. These included practical jokes, surprise early
3612 morning runs, and leaping out at him from behind doors while wearing
3613 Willie the Vampire masks in order, he said, to take him out of himself.
3615 [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
3621 %title Soul Music (11)
3623 But this didn't feel like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt
3626 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3629 "Yes," said the skull. "Quit while you're a head, that's what I say."
3631 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3633 # p.2 (Harper Torch edition)
3635 But if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is
3636 observed,(1) it's even more true that it changes the observer.
3638 (1) Because of Quantum.
3640 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3644 It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
3645 In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the
3646 equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company
3647 written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.
3649 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3653 Then the skull said: "Kids today, eh?"
3655 "I blame education," said the raven.
3657 "A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing," said the skull. "A lot more
3658 dangerous than just a little. I always used to say that, when I was
3661 "When was that, exactly?"
3663 "Can't remember. I think I was pretty knowledgeable. Probably a teacher
3664 or philosopher, something of that kidney. And now I'm on a bench with a
3665 bird crapping on my head."
3667 "Very allegorical," said the raven.
3669 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3671 # p. 87 (Stabbing: "in the" both capitalized; "and" not so)
3673 The Mended Drum had traditionally gone in for, well, traditional pub games,
3674 such as dominoes, darts, and Stabbing People In The Back and Taking All
3675 Their Money. The new owner had decided to go up-market. This was the
3676 only available direction.
3678 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3680 # pp. 125-126 ("him"==Librarian;
3681 # Leonard of Quirm==Discworld analog of Leonardo da Vinci)
3683 The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained
3684 to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly
3685 ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be
3686 a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading
3687 them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did
3688 the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the
3691 For example, the big volume open in front of him contained some of the
3692 collected drawings of Leonard of Quirm, skilled artist and certified
3693 genious, with a mind that wandered so much it came back with souvenirs.
3695 Leonard's books were full of sketches--of kittens, of the way water flows,
3696 of the wives of influential Ankh-Morporkian merchants whose portraits had
3697 provided his means of making a living. But Leonard had been a genius and
3698 was deeply sensitive to the wonders of the world, so the margins were full
3699 of detailed doodles of whatever was on this mind at the moment--vast
3700 water-powered engines for bringing down city walls on the heads of the
3701 enemy, new types of siege guns for pumping flaming oil over the enemy,
3702 gunpowder rockets that showered the enemy with burning phosphorous, and
3703 other manufactures of the Age of Reason.
3705 And there had been something else. The Librarian had noticed it in
3706 passing once before, and had been slightly puzzled by it. It seemed out
3709 (1) And didn't appear to do anything to the enemy /at all/.
3711 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3713 # p. 152 (much of the story concerns "Music With Rocks In")
3715 Some religions say that the universe was started with a word, a song,
3716 a dance, a piece of music. The Listening Monks of the Ramtops have
3717 trained their hearing until they can tell the value of a playing card by
3718 listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the
3719 subtle sounds of the universe to piece together, from the fossile echoes,
3720 the very first noises.
3722 There was certainly, they say, a very strange noise at the beginning of
3725 But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the
3726 frozen echoes in the ammonites and amber, swear they can detect some tiny
3729 It sounded, they say, like someone counting: One, Two, Three, Four.
3731 The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make
3732 out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier.
3734 When they asked him what it was, he said: "It sounds like One, Two."
3736 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3740 The Death of Rats put his nose in his paws. It was a lot easier with
3743 (1) Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly
3744 before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats.
3745 The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat
3746 tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats--and then
3747 people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being
3748 drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there /still/
3749 seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully
3750 while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one
3751 memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty
3752 offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any
3753 situtation involving money: "Tax the rat farms."
3755 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3757 # pp. 313-314 (Drongo and Big Mad Adrian are students)
3759 The Archchancellor polished this staff as he walked along. It was a
3760 particularly good one, six feet long and quite magical. Not that he used
3761 magic very much. In his experience, anything that couldn't be disposed of
3762 with a couple of whacks from six feet of oak was probably immune to magic
3765 "Don't you think we should have brought the senior wizards, sir?" said
3766 Ponder, struggling to keep up.
3768 "I'm afraid that taking them along in their present state of mind would
3769 only make what happens"--Ridcully sought for a useful phrase, and settled
3770 for--"happen worse. I've insisted they stay in college."
3772 "How about Drongo and the others?" said Ponder hopefully.
3774 "Would they be any good in the event of a thaumaturgical dimension rip of
3775 enormous proportions?" said Ridcully. "I remember poor Mr. Hong. One
3776 minute he was dishing up an order of double cod and mushy peas, the
3779 "Kaboom?" said Ponder.
3781 "Kaboom?" said Ridcully, forcing his way up the crowded street. "Not
3782 that I heard tell. More like 'Aaaaerrrr-scream-gristle- gristle-gristle-
3783 crack' and a shower of fried food. Big Mad Adrian and his friends any
3784 good when the chips are down?"
3786 "Um. Probably not, Archchancellor."
3788 "Correct. People shout and run about. That never did any good. A pocket
3789 full of decent spells and a well-charged staff will get you out of trouble
3790 nine times out of ten."
3792 "Nine times out of ten?"
3796 "How many times have you had to rely on them, sir?"
3798 "Well ... there was Mr. Hong ... that business with the thing in the
3799 Bursar's wardrobe ... that dragon, you remember ..." Ridcully's lips
3800 moved silently as he counted on his fingers. "Nine times, so far."
3802 "It worked every time, sir?"
3804 "Absolutely! So there's no need to worry. Gangway! Wizard comin'
3807 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3811 The wizards went rigid as the howl rang through the building. It was
3812 slightly animal but also mineral, metallic, edged like a saw.
3814 Eventually the Lecturer in Recent Runes said, "Of course, just because
3815 we've heard a spine-chilling blood-curdling scream of the sort to make
3816 your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's
3819 The wizards looked out into the corridor.
3821 "It came from downstairs somewhere," said the Chair of Indefinite Studies,
3822 heading for the staircase.
3824 "So why are you going /upstairs/?"
3826 "Because I'm not daft!"
3828 "But it might be some terrible emanation!"
3830 "You don't say?" said the Chair, still accelerating.
3832 "All right, please yourself. That's the students floor up there."
3836 The Chair came down slowly, occasionally glancing fearfully up the stairs.
3838 [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
3844 %title Interesting Times (10)
3847 Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are
3848 always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles.
3849 When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of
3850 circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is
3851 killed by a freak chain of events--the oil spilled just there, the safety
3852 fence broken just there--that must also be a miracle. Just because it's
3853 not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.
3855 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3859 "Oh, no," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. "Not
3860 that. That's meddling with things you don't understand."
3862 "Well, we /are/ wizards," said Ridcully. "We're supposed to meddle with
3863 things we don't understand. If we hung around waitin' till we understood
3864 things we'd never get anything done."
3866 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3870 According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest
3871 abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because
3872 it is better organized.
3874 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3878 Many things went on at Unseen University and, regretably, teaching had to
3879 be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had
3880 perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all
3881 right because, to be fair, so had the students.
3883 The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on
3884 the status of a tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they
3885 were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no one
3886 attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that
3887 this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no one ever
3888 attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the
3889 Reader in Woolly Thinking(1)) that lectures had taken place /in essence/,
3890 so that was all right, too.
3892 And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old
3893 method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinty of a lot of books
3894 and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the
3895 actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns
3896 for exactly the same reason.
3898 (1) Which is like Fuzzy Logic, only less so.
3900 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3902 # p. 20 (speaker is Archchancellor Ridcully; sad, hopless person is Rincewind)
3904 "Wizzard?" he said. "What kind of sad, hopeless person needs to write
3905 WIZZARD on their hat?"
3907 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3911 Self-doubt was something not regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium.
3912 When you're trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted
3913 temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the
3914 other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it
3915 that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves
3916 questions like "What is the purpose of life?" very quickly lacked both.
3918 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3920 # p. 113 (same page as previous passage...)
3922 Cohen's father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a
3923 lad, and explained to him the hero's creed and told him that there was no
3924 greater joy than to die in battle.
3926 Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime's experience
3927 had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the /other/
3928 bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your
3929 horse. It was an observation that had served him well.
3931 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3935 "'Dang'?" he said. "Wassat mean? And what's this 'darn' and 'heck'?"
3937 "They are ... /civilised/ swearwords." said Mr. Saveloy.
3939 "Well, you can take 'em and--"
3941 "Ah?" said Mr. Saveloy, raising a cautionary finger.
3943 "You can shove them up--"
3951 Truckle shut his eyes and clenched his fists.
3953 "Darn it all to heck!" he shouted.
3955 "Good," said Mr. Saveloy. "That's much better."
3957 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3959 # p. 219 (sic: "Dedd")
3961 The taxman was warming to his new job. He'd worked out that although the
3962 Horde, as individuals, had acquired mountains of cash in their careers as
3963 barbarian heroes they'd lost almost all of it engaging in the other
3964 activities (he mentally catalogued these as Public Relations) necessary to
3965 the profession, and therefore were entitled to quite a considerable rebate.
3967 The fact that they were registered with no revenue collecting authority
3968 /anywhere/(1) was entirely a secondary point. It was the principle that
3969 counted. And the interest, too, of course.
3971 (1) Except on posters with legends like "Wanted--Dedd".
3973 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3977 "What do we do now?" said Mr. Saveloy. "Do we do a battle chant or
3980 "We just wait," said Cohen.
3982 "There's a lot of waiting in warfare," said Boy Willie.
3984 "Ah, yes," said Mr. Saveloy. "I've heard people say that. They say
3985 there's long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement."
3987 "Not really," said Cohen. "It's more like short periods of waiting
3988 followed by long periods of being dead."
3990 [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
3996 %title Maskerade (9)
3997 # pp. 81-82, continued on pp. 87-89 (Harper Torch edition; apparently
3998 # transcribed from some other edition based on quote marks used;
3999 # a great number of very short paragraphs--it stretches a long way
4000 # when using a blank line to separate one paragraph from another;
4001 # one omitted bit is that after Granny shuffles the deck of cards
4002 # and deals two poker hands, Death swaps them, suggesting that
4003 # he suspected her of cheating; initial transcription left off
4004 # the most interesting bit, Death's wink at the end)
4006 'Maybe you could ... help us?'
4012 Granny opened the door farther and saw the woman standing behind Mr. Slot.
4013 One look at her face was enough. There was a bundle in her arms.
4015 Granny stepped back. 'Bring him in and let me have a look at him.'
4017 She took the baby from the woman, sat down on the room's one chair, and
4018 pulled back the blanket. Nanny Ogg peered over her shoulder.
4020 'Hmm,' said Granny, after a while. She glanced at Nanny, who gave an
4021 almost imperceptible shake of her head.
4023 'There's a curse on this house, that's what it is,' said Slot. 'My best
4024 cow's been taken mortally sick, too.'
4026 'Oh? You have a cowshed?' said Granny. 'Very good place for a sickroom,
4027 a cowshed. It's the warmth. You better show me where it is.'
4029 'You want to take the boy down there?'
4035 'How many have you come for?'
4041 Death shook his head.
4043 'It could /be/ the cow.'
4045 NO. THAT WOULD BE CHANGING HISTORY.
4047 'History is about things changing.'
4053 'Then I challenge you to a game. That's traditional. That's /allowed/.'
4055 Death was silent for a moment.
4061 CHALLENGING ME BY MEANS OF A GAME IS ALLOWABLE.
4065 HOWEVER ... YOU UNDERSTAND THAT TO WIN ALL YOU MUST GAMBLE ALL?
4067 'Double or quits? Yes, I know.'
4071 'Can't abide chess.'
4073 OR CRIPPLE MR. ONION. I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES.
4075 'Very well. How about one hand of poker? Five cards each, no draws?
4076 Sudden death, as they say.'
4078 Death thought about this, too.
4080 YOU KNOW THIS FAMILY?
4086 'Are we talking or are we playing?'
4092 Granny looked at her cards, and threw them down.
4094 FOUR QUEENS. HMM. THAT /IS/ VERY HIGH.
4096 Death looked down at his cards, and then up into Granny's steady, blue-eyed
4099 Neither moved for some time.
4101 Then Death laid the hand on the table.
4103 I LOSE, he said. ALL I HAVE IS FOUR ONES.
4105 He looked back into Granny's eyes for a moment. There was a blue glow in
4106 the depth of his eye-sockets. Maybe, for the merest fraction of a second,
4107 barely noticeable even to the closest observation, one winked off.
4109 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4111 # p. 67 (Harper Torch edition; as above, transcribed from some other edition)
4113 The letter inside was on a sheet of the Opera House's own note paper.
4114 In neat, copperplate writing, it said:
4116 Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!
4122 'What sort of person,' said Salzella patiently, 'sits down and /writes/ a
4123 maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A
4124 sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do
4127 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4129 # pp. 30-31 (Harper Torch edition)
4131 Agnes had woken up one morning with the horrible realization that she'd
4132 been saddled with a lovely personality. It was as simple as that. Oh,
4135 It wasn't so much the personality, it was the "but" people always added
4136 when they talked about it. /But she's got a lovely personality/, they
4137 said. It was the lack of choice that rankled. No one had asked her,
4138 before she was born, whether she wanted a lovely personality or whether
4139 she'd prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take
4140 size nine in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that
4141 beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair
4144 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4148 'And what can I get you, officers?' she said.
4150 'Officers? Us?' said the Count de Nobbes. 'What makes you think we're
4153 'He's got a helmet on,' Nanny pointed out. 'Also, he's got his badge
4154 pinned to his coat.'
4156 'I /told/ you to put it away!' Nobby hissed. He looked at Nanny and
4157 smiled uneasily. 'Milit'ry chic,' he said. 'It's just a fashion
4158 accessory. Actually, we are gentlemen of means and have nothing to do
4159 with the city Watch whatsoever.'
4161 'Well, /gentlemen/, would you like some wine?'
4163 'Not while we on duty, t'anks,' said the troll.
4165 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4167 # p. 27 (Harper Torch edition)
4169 Lancre had always bred strong, capable women. A Lancre farmer needed a
4170 wife who'd think nothing of beating a wolf to death with her apron when
4171 she went out to get some firewood. And, while kissing initially seemed to
4172 have more charms than cookery, a stolid Lancre lad looking for a bride
4173 would bear in mind his father's advice that kisses eventually lost their
4174 fire but cookery tended to get even better over the years, and direct his
4175 courting to those families that clearly showed a tradition of enjoying
4178 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4182 Music and magic had a lot in common. They were only two letters apart,
4183 for one thing. And you couldn't do both.
4185 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4189 She'd caught herself saying "poot!" and "dang!" when she wanted to swear,
4190 and using pink writing paper.
4192 She'd got a reputation for being calm and capable in a crisis.
4194 Next thing she knew she'd be making shortbread and apple pies as good as
4195 her mother's, and then there'd be no hope for her.
4197 So she'd introduced Perdita. She'd heard somewhere that inside every fat
4198 woman was a thin woman trying to get out,(1) so she'd named her Perdita.
4199 She was a good repository for all those thoughts that Agnes couldn't think
4200 on account of her wonderful personality. Perdita would use black writing
4201 paper if she could get away with it, and would be beautifully pale instead
4202 of embarassingly flushed. Perdita wanted to be an interestingly lost soul
4203 in plum-colored lipstick. Just occasionally, though, Agnes thought
4204 Perdita was as dumb as she was.
4206 (1) Or, at least, dying for chocolate.
4208 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4210 # p. 197 (dress shop proprietor has just sold an expensive dress to Granny)
4212 She looked down at the money in her hand.
4214 She knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that
4215 people had hung on to it for years, and she knew about new money, which
4216 seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the
4217 city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork
4218 shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in
4219 her hand rather than someone else's. The best kind of money was mine,
4222 Besides, she was also enough of a snob to confuse rudeness with good
4223 breeding. In the same way that the really rich can never be mad (they're
4224 eccentric), so they can also never be rude (they're outspoken and
4227 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4231 Detritus reached down and picked up an eye patch.
4233 "What d'you think, then?" said Nobby scornfully. "You think he turned into
4234 a bat and flew away?"
4236 "Ha! I do not t'ink that 'cos it is in ... consist ... ent with modern
4237 policing," said Detritus.
4239 "Well, /I/ think," said Nobby, "that when you have ruled out the impossible,
4240 what is left, however improbable, ain't worth hanging around on a cold night
4241 wonderin' about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink.
4242 Come on. I want to try a leg of the elephant that bit me."
4246 "That was metaphor."
4248 [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
4254 %title Feet of Clay (14)
4256 Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through
4257 anything. It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need
4258 people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever
4261 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4263 # p. 337 (Harper Torch edition)
4265 It was hard enough to kill a vampire. You could stake them down and turn
4266 them into dust and ten years later someone drops a drop of blood in the
4267 wrong place and /guess who's back/? They returned more times than raw
4270 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4274 People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only
4275 because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't
4276 look quite like real science.(1) But geography is only physics slowed
4277 down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of
4278 excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time.
4279 It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south
4282 (1) That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra
4283 legs and then blow it up.
4285 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4289 Upstairs, Vimes pushed open his office door carefully. The Assassins'
4290 Guild played to rules. You could say that about the bastards. It was
4291 terribly bad form to kill a bystander. Apart from anything else, you
4292 wouldn't get paid. So traps in his office were out of the question,
4293 because too many people were in and out of it every day. Even so, it
4294 paid to be careful. Vimes /was/ good at making the kind of rich enemies
4295 who could afford to employ assassins. The assassins had to be lucky
4296 only once, but Vimes had to be lucky all the time.
4298 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4300 # p. 86 (passage continues, actually finding an image in dead man's eyes)
4302 "Er ... have you ever heard the story about dead men's eyes, sir?"
4304 "Assume I haven't had a literary education, Littlebottom."
4306 "Well ... they say ..."
4310 "/They/, sir. You know, /they/."
4312 "The same people who're the 'everyone' in 'everyone knows'? The people
4313 who live in 'the community'?"
4315 "Yes, sir. I suppose so, sir."
4317 Vimes waved a hand. "Oh, /them/. Well, go on."
4319 "They say that the last thing a man sees stays imprinted in his eyes, sir."
4321 "Oh, /that/. That's just an old story."
4323 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4327 Everyone in the city looked after themselves. That's what the guilds were
4328 for. People banded together against other people. The guild looked after
4329 you from the cradle to the grave or, in the case of the Assassins, to
4330 other people's graves. They even maintained the law, or at least they had
4331 done, after a fashion. Thieving without a license was punishable by death
4332 for the first offense.(1) The Thieves' Guild saw to that. The arrangement
4333 sounded unreal, but it worked.
4335 It worked like a machine. That was fine except for the occasional people
4336 who got caught in the wheels.
4338 (1) The Ankh-Morpork view of crime and punishment was that the penalty for
4339 the first offence should prevent the possibility of a second offense.
4341 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4343 # p. 129, continued pp. 132-133
4345 Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head, and set off after it. No
4346 thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and
4347 policemen to chase anything that runs away.
4351 Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure. It wasn't quite
4352 so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning
4353 stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled
4354 pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out from a cross street.(1)
4356 (1) This always happens in any police chase /anywhere/. A heavily laden
4357 lorry will /always/ pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit. If
4358 vehicles aren't involved, then it'll be a man with a rack of garments.
4359 Or two men with a large sheet of glass. There's probably some kind of
4360 secret society behind all this.
4362 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4366 Ron had a small grayish-brown, torn-eared terrier on the end of a string,
4367 although in truth it would be hard for an observer to know exactly who
4368 was leading whom and who, when push came to shove, would be the one to
4369 fold at the knees if the other shouted "Sit!" Because, although trained
4370 canines as aids for those bereft of sight, and even of hearing, have
4371 frequently been used throughout the universe, Foul Ole Ron was the first
4372 person ever to own a Thinking-Brain Dog.
4374 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4378 Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues.
4380 He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They
4383 And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man
4384 and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir. I can tell
4385 you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some
4386 years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and
4387 then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance
4388 and the state of a man's boots, when /exactly the same/ comments could
4389 apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a
4390 spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tatooed
4391 once when he was drunk and seventeen(1) and in fact got seasick on a wet
4392 pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety
4393 of the human experience.
4395 It was the same with more static evidence. The footprints in the
4396 flowerbed were probably /in the real world/ left by the window-cleaner.
4397 The scream in the night was quite likely a man getting out of bed and
4398 stepping sharply on an upturned hairbrush.
4400 The real world was far too /real/ to leave neat little hints. It was full
4401 of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got
4402 at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of
4403 eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions
4404 and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you
4405 just hoped like hell that some bugger's nerve'd crack and he'd give himself
4408 (1) These terms are often synonymous.
4410 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4414 "Life has certainly been more reliable under Vetinari," said Mr. Potts of
4417 "He does have all the street-theater players and mime artists thrown into
4418 the scorpion pit," said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves' Guild.
4420 "True. But let's not forget that he has his bad points too. [...]"
4422 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4426 What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told
4427 him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve
4430 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4434 Rogers the bulls were angry and bewildered, which counts as the basic state
4435 of mind for full grown bulls.(1)
4437 (1) Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls'
4438 view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping
4439 hemispherical view of the world. Since there were two separate visions,
4440 Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls not having
4441 been bred for much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe this, which is
4442 why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at
4443 you. They do this because both of them want to see.
4445 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4447 # p. 312 ('meaning' line capitalizes every word, including 'A','For','To')
4449 "It's the most menacing dwarf battle-cry there is! Once it's been shouted
4450 /someone/ has to be killed!"
4454 "Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"
4456 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4458 # p. 347 (Colon is addressing Dorfl, a golem who is joining the Watch)
4460 "Y'know," said Colon, "if it doesn't work out, you could always get a job
4461 making fortune cookies."
4463 "Funny thing, that," said Nobby. "You never get bad fortunes in cookies,
4464 ever noticed that? They never say stuff like: 'Oh dear, things are going
4465 to be /really/ bad.' I mean, they're never /misfortune/ cookies."
4467 Vimes lit a cigar and shook the match to put it out. "That, Corporal, is
4468 because of one of the fundamental driving forces of the universe."
4470 "What? Like, people who read fortune cookies are the lucky ones?" said
4473 "No. Because people who /sell/ fortune cookies want to go on selling
4476 [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
4482 %title Hogfather (10)
4483 # p. 1 (Harper Torch edition)
4485 Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree.
4487 But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of
4488 things. They wonder how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the
4489 makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words. Yet there is the
4490 constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, raveling
4491 nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate
4492 that here, /here/, is the point where it all began ...
4494 /Something/ began when the Guild of Assassins enrolled Mister Teatime,
4495 who saw things differently from other people, and one of the ways that
4496 he saw things differently from other people was in seeing other people
4497 as things (later, Lord Downey of the Guild said, "We took pity on him
4498 because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on
4499 reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that.")
4501 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4505 If asked to describe what they did for a living, the five men around the
4506 table would have said something like "This and that" or "The best I can,"
4507 although in Banjo's case he'd probably have said "Dur?" They were, by the
4508 standards of an uncaring society, criminals, although they wouldn't have
4509 thought of themselves as such and couldn't even /spell/ words like
4510 "nefarious." What they generally did was move things around. Sometimes
4511 the things were on the wrong side of a steel door, or in the wrong house.
4512 Sometimes the things were in fact people who were far too unimportant to
4513 trouble the Assassins' Guild with, but who were nevertheless inconveniently
4514 positioned where they were and would be much better located on, for
4515 example, a sea bed somewhere.(1) None of the five belonged to any formal
4516 guild and they generally found their clients among those people who, for
4517 their own dark reasons, didn't want to put the guilds to any trouble,
4518 sometimes because they were guild members themselves. They had plenty of
4519 work. There was always something that needed transferring from A to B or,
4520 of course, to the bottom of the C.
4522 (1) Chickenwire had got his name from his own individual contribution to
4523 the science of this very specialized "concrete overshoe" form of waste
4524 disposal. An unfortunate drawback of the process was the tendency for
4525 bits of the client to eventually detach and float to the surface, causing
4526 much comment among the general poplation. Enough chicken wire, he pointed
4527 out, would solve that, while also allowing the ingress of crabs and fish
4528 going about their vital recycling activities.
4530 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4534 Although it was Hogswatch the University buildings were bustling. Wizards
4535 didn't go to bed early in any case,(1) and of course there was the
4536 Hogswatchnight Feast to look forward to at midnight.
4538 It would give some idea of the scale of the Hogswatchnight Feast that a
4539 light snack at UU consisted of three or four courses, not counting the
4542 Some of the wizards had been practicing for weeks. The Dean in particular
4543 could now lift a twenty-pound turkey on one fork. Having to wait until
4544 midnight merely put a healthy edge on appetites already professionally
4547 (1) Often they lived to a time scale to suit themselves. Many of the
4548 senior ones, of course, lived entirely in the past, but several were like
4549 the Professor of Anthropics, who had invented an entire temporal system
4550 based on the belief that all the other ones were a mere illusion.
4552 Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles. The
4553 Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be
4554 constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they
4555 could make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One
4556 says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that
4557 humans should not only work in universities, but also write for huge sums
4558 books with words like "Cosmic" and "Chaos" in the titles.(2)
4560 The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable
4561 Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of
4562 the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics.
4563 But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely
4564 everyone, with only some minor details of a "Fill in name here" nature,
4565 secretly believes to be true.
4567 (2) And they are correct. The universe clearly operates for the benefit
4568 of humanity. This can be readily seen by the convenient way the sun comes
4569 up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.
4571 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4573 # pp. 112-113 (we end this passage mid-paragraph...)
4575 "Watch this, sir," said Ponder. "All right, Adrian, initialize the GBL."
4577 "How do you do that, then?" said Ridcully, behind him.
4579 "It ... it means pull the great big lever," Ponder said, reluctantly.
4581 "Ah. Takes less time to say."
4583 Ponder sighed. "Yes, that's right, Archchancellor."
4585 He nodded to one of the students, who pulled a large red lever marked "Do
4586 Not Pull." Gears spun, somewhere inside Hex. Little trapdoors opened in
4587 the ant farms and millions of ants began to scurry along the networks of
4588 glass tubing. Ponder tapped at the huge wooden keyboard.
4590 "Beats me how you fellows remember how to do all this stuff," said Ridcully,
4591 still watching him with what Ponder considered to be amused interest.
4593 "Oh, it's largely intuitive, Archchancellor," said Ponder. "Obviously you
4594 have to spend a lot of time learning it first, though. [...]"
4596 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4600 "Tell me, Senior Wrangler, we never invited any /women/ to the
4601 Hogswatchnight Feast, did we?"
4603 "Of course not, Archchancellor," said the Senior Wrangler. He looked up
4604 in the dust-covered rafters, wondering what had caught the Archchancellor's
4605 eye. "Good heavens, no. They'd spoil everything. I've always said so."
4607 "And all the maids have got the evening off until midnight?."
4609 "A very generous custom, I've always said," said the Senior Wrangler,
4610 feeling his neck crick.
4612 "So why, every year, do we hang a damn great bunch of mistletoe up there?"
4614 The Senior Wrangler turned in a circle, still looking upward.
4616 "Well, er ... it's well, it's ... it's symbolic, Archchancellor."
4620 The Senior Wrangler felt that something more was expected. He groped
4621 around in the dusty attics of his education.
4623 "Of ... the leaves, d'y'see ... they're symbolic of ... of green, d'y'see,
4624 whereas the berries, in fact, yes, the berries symbolize ... symbolize
4625 white. Yes. White and green. Very ... symbolic."
4627 He waited. He was not, unfortunately, disappointed.
4631 The Senior Wrangler coughed.
4633 "I'm not sure there /has/ to be an /of/," he said.
4635 "Ah? So," said the Archchancellor thoughtfully, "it could be said that
4636 the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?"
4638 "Yes, indeed," said the Senior Wrangler.
4640 "So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?"
4642 "Exactly, Archchancellor," said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just
4645 "Funny thing, that," said Ridcully, in the same thoughful tone of voice.
4646 "That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully
4647 comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute
4648 tosh. Which is it, I wonder?"
4650 "It could be both," said the Senior Wrangler desperately.
4652 "And /that/ comment," said Ridcully, "is either very perceptive or very
4657 "Don't push it, Senior Wrangler."
4659 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4661 # p. 170 ([sic], sentence at end of paragraph should have fourth period)
4663 What Ponder was worried about was the fear that he was simply engaged in a
4664 cargo cult. He'd read about them. Ignorant(1) and credulous(2) people,
4665 whose island might once have been visited by some itinerant merchant
4666 vessel that traded pearls and coconuts for such fruits of civilization as
4667 glass beads, mirrors, axes, and sexual diseases, would later make big model
4668 ships out of bamboo in the hope of once again attracting this magical
4669 cargo. Of course, they were far too ignorant and credulous to know that
4670 just because you built the shape you didn't get the substance ...
4672 (1) Ignorant: the state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find
4673 the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things
4674 like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple
4675 sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the
4676 Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by
4677 the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across
4678 a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a
4679 small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from
4680 the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's
4681 a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about
4682 the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.
4684 (2) Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's
4685 place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the
4686 most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
4688 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4690 # p. 244 (mantelpiece: it's dark and Ponder is checking whether the Hogfather
4691 # [Discworld analog of Santa Claus/Father Christmas] has been there
4692 # and left presents in the stocking the Librarian has hung)
4694 There was silence again, and then a clang. The Librarian grunted in his
4697 "What are you doing?"
4699 "I just knocked over the coal shovel."
4701 "Why are feeling around on the mantelpiece?"
4703 Oh, just ... you know, just ... just looking. A little ... experiment.
4704 After all, you never know."
4706 "You never know what?"
4708 "Just ... never know, you know."
4710 "/Sometimes/ you know," said Ridcully. "I think I know quite a lot that
4711 I didn't used to know. It's amazing what you /do/ end up knowing, I
4712 sometimes think. I often wonder what new stuff I'll know."
4714 "Well, you never know."
4718 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4722 IT GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN, LIFE, said Death, stepping forward. SPEAKING
4723 METAPHORICALLY, OF COURSE. IT'S A HABIT THAT'S HARD TO GIVE UP. ONE PUFF
4724 OF BREATH IS NEVER ENOUGH. YOU'LL FIND YOU WANT TO TAKE ANOTHER.
4726 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4730 HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL
4731 MEETS THE RISING APE.
4733 "Tooth Fairies? Hogfathers? Little--"
4735 YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE /LITTLE/
4738 "So we can believe the big ones?"
4740 YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
4742 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4744 # p. 343 (Mr. Teatime [pronounced Teh-ah-tim-eh] has just been thwarted in
4745 # his elabrate plot to lure and then kill Death)
4747 "What did he do it all for?" said Susan. "I mean, why? Money? Power?"
4749 SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING FOR THE SHEER FASCINATION OF DOING IT, said
4750 Death. OR THE FAME. OR BECAUSE THEY SHOULDN'T.
4752 [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
4760 It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to
4761 think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault.
4762 If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be.
4763 I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks
4764 of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do
4767 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4769 # pp. 23-25 (Harper Torch edition) [transcribed from some other edition]
4771 There was a general shifting of position and a group clearing of throats.
4773 'What about mercenaries?' said Boggis.
4775 'The problem with mercenaries', said the Patrician, 'is that they need to
4776 be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up
4777 paying them even more to stop--'
4779 Selachii thumped the table.
4781 'Very well, then, by jingo!' he snarled. 'Alone!'
4783 'We could certainly do with one,' said Lord Vetinari. 'We need the money.
4784 I was about to say that we cannot /afford/ mercenaries.'
4786 'How can this be?' said Lord Downey. Don't we pay our taxes?'
4788 'Ah, I thought we might come to that,' said Lord Vetinari. He raised
4789 his hand and, on cue again, his clerk placed a piece of paper in it.
4791 'Let me see now ... ah yes. Guild of Assassins ... Gross earnings in
4792 the last year: AM$13,207,048. Taxes paid in the last year: forty-seven
4793 dollars, twenty-two pence and what on examination turned out to be a
4794 Hershebian half-/dong/, worth one eighth of a penny.'
4796 'That's all perfectly legal! The Guild of Accountants--'
4798 'Ah yes. Guild of Accountants: gross earnings AM$7,999,011. Taxes paid:
4799 nil. But, ah yes, I see they applied for a rebate of AM$200,000.'
4801 'And what we received, I may say, included a Hershebian half-/dong/,'
4802 said Mr Frostrip of the Guild of Accountants.
4804 'What goes around comes around,' said Vetinari calmly.
4806 He tossed the paper aside. 'Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy
4807 farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the
4808 minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.'
4810 'Are you telling us that Ankh-Morpork is /bankrupt/?' said Downey.
4812 'Of course. While, at the same time, full of rich people. I trust they
4813 have been spending their good fortune on swords.'
4815 'And you have /allowed/ this wholesale tax avoidance?' said Lord Selachii.
4817 'Oh, the taxes haven't been avoided,' said Lord Vetinari. 'Or even evaded.
4818 They just haven't been paid.'
4820 'That is a disgusting state of affairs!'
4822 The Patrician raised his eyebrows. 'Commander Vines?'
4826 'Would you be so good as to assemble a squad of your most experienced men,
4827 liaise with the tax gatherers and obtain the accumulated back taxes,
4828 please? My clerk here will give you a list of the prime defaulters.'
4830 'Right, sir. And if they resist, sir?' said Vimes, smiling nastily.
4832 'Oh, how can they resist, commander? This is the will of our civic
4833 leaders.' He took the paper his clerk proferred. 'Let me see, now. Top
4836 Lord Selachii coughed hurriedly. 'Far too late for that sort of nonsense
4839 'Water under the bridge,' said Lord Downey.
4841 'Dead and buried,' said Mr Slant.
4843 'I paid mine,' said Vimes.
4845 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4847 # p. 7 (Harper Torch edition)
4849 As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer
4850 who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot
4851 home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus.
4853 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4857 Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My
4858 Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a post-
4859 graduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.
4861 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4865 "Hey, that's Reg Shoe! He's a zombie. He falls to bits all the time!"
4867 "Very big man in undead community, sir," said Carrott.
4869 "How come /he/ joined?"
4871 "He came round last week to complain about the Watch harassing some
4872 bogeymen, sir. He was very, er, vehement, sir. So I persuaded him that
4873 what the Watch needed was some expertise, so he joined up, sir."
4875 "No more complaints?"
4877 "Twice as many, sir. All from undead, sir, and all against Mr. Shoe.
4880 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4884 Perhaps it was because he was tired, or just because he was trying to shut
4885 out the world, but Vimes found himself slowing down into the traditional
4886 Watchman's walk and the traditional idling thought process.
4888 It was an almost Pavlovian response.(1) The legs swung, the feet moved,
4889 the mind began to work in a certain way. It wasn't a dream state, exactly.
4890 It was just that the ears, nose and eyeballs wired themselves straight into
4891 the ancient "suspicious bastard" node of his brain, leaving his higher
4892 brain center free to freewheel.
4894 (1) A term invented by the wizard Denephew Boot,(2) who had found that by
4895 a system of rewards and punishments he could train a dog, at the ringing
4896 of a bell, to immediately eat a strawberry meringue.
4898 (2) His parents, who were uncomplicated country people, had wanted a girl.
4899 They were expecting to call her Denise.
4901 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4905 "What was it, Leonard?"
4907 "An experimental device for turning chemical energy into rotary motion,"
4908 said Leonard. "The problem, you see, is getting the little pellets of
4909 black powder into the combustion chamber at exactly the right speed and
4910 one at a time. If two ignite together, well, what he have is the
4911 /external/ combustion engine."
4913 "And, er, what would be the purpose of it?" said the Patrician.
4915 "I believe it could replace the horse," Leonard said proudly.
4917 They looked at the stricken thing.
4919 "One of the advantages of horses that people often point out," said
4920 Vetinari, after some thought, "is that they very seldom explode. Almost
4921 never, in my experience, apart from that unfortunate occurrence in the hot
4922 summer a few years ago." With fastidious fingers he pulled something out
4923 of the mess. It was a pair of cubes, made out of some soft white fur and
4924 linked together by a piece of string. There were dots on them.
4928 Leonard smiled in an embarrassed fashion. "Yes. I can't think why I
4929 thought they'd help it go better. It was just, well, an idea. You know
4932 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4934 # p. 98 (1st "He": Leonard; 2nd "He": Vetinari; last "He": Leonard again)
4936 He was as easily distracted as a kitten. All that business with the
4937 flying machine, for example. Giant bat wings hung from the ceiling even
4938 now. The Patrician had been more than happy to let him waste his time on
4939 that idea, because it was obvious to anyone that no human being would ever
4940 be able to flap the wings hard enough.
4942 He needn't have worried. Leonard was his own distraction. He had ended
4943 up spending ages designing a special tray so that people could eat their
4946 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4950 She held the lamp higher.
4952 Ramkins looked down their noses at her from their frames, through the brown
4953 varnish of the centuries. Portraits were another thing that had been
4954 collected out of unregarded habit.
4956 Most of them were men. They were invariably in armor and always on
4957 horseback. And every single one of them had fought the sworn enemies of
4960 In recent times this had been quite difficult and her grandfather, for
4961 example, had to lead an expedition all the way to Howondaland in order to
4962 find some sworn enemies, although there was an adequate supply and a lot
4963 of swearing by the time he left. Earlier, of course, it had been a lot
4964 easier. Ramkin regiments had fought the city's enemies all over the Sto
4965 Plains and had inflicted heroic casualties, quite often on people in the
4968 (1) It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military
4969 thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other
4970 side then this is a valuable bonus.
4972 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4974 # pp. 180-181 (the same gag was used in the 1968 movie "Support Your Local
4975 # Sheriff", with a dented badge rather than a book)
4977 He rummaged in a pocket and produced a very small book, which he held up
4980 "This belonged to my great-grandad," he said. "He was in the scrap we had
4981 against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayers for
4982 soldiers, 'cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and
4983 he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, 'cause he couldn't afford
4984 armor, and next day in battle--whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham,
4985 straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page
4986 before stopping, look. You can see the hole."
4988 "Pretty miraculous," Carrot agreed.
4990 "Yeah, it was, I s'pose," said the sergeant. He looked ruefully at the
4991 battered volume. "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really."
4993 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
4997 "Er ... what is this thing called?" said Colon, as he followed the
4998 Patrician up the ladder.
5000 "Well, because it is /submersed/ in a /marine/ environment, I've always
5001 called it the Going-Under-the-Water-Safely Device," said Leonard, behind
5002 him.(1) "But usually I just think of it as the boat."
5004 (1) Thinking up good names was, oddly enough, was one area where Leonard
5005 of Quirm's genious tended to give up.
5007 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
5009 # p. 274 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
5011 "[...] I mean, what're our long-term objectives?"
5013 "Cooking meals and keeping warm?" said Les hopefully.
5015 "Well, /initially/," said Jackson. "That's obvious. But you know what
5016 they say, lad. 'Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to
5017 him and he's warm for the rest of his life.' See my point?"
5019 "I don't think that's actually what the saying is--"
5021 [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
5027 %title The Last Continent (10)
5028 # p. 260 (Harper Torch edition)
5030 "Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?"
5034 "Ghastly thought, really." Rincewind shuddered. "Oh, /gods/, I've just
5035 had another one. Suppose I /am/ just about to die and /this/ is my whole
5036 life passing in front of my eyes?"
5038 I THINK PERHAPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. PEOPLE'S WHOLE LIVES /DO/ PASS IN
5039 FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED "LIVING". [...]
5041 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5044 "When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the
5047 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5049 # p.3 (Harper Torch edition)
5051 All tribal myths are true, for a given value of "true."
5053 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5057 Ponder /knew/ he should never have let Ridcully look at the invisible
5058 writings. Wasn't it a basic principle never to let your employer know what
5059 it is that you actually /do/ all day?
5061 But no matter what precautions you took, sooner or later the boss was bound
5062 to come in and poke around and say things like, "Is this where you work,
5063 then?" and "I thought I sent a memo out about people bringing in potted
5064 plants," and "What d'you call that thing with the keyboard?"
5066 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5068 # p. 21 (passage begins mid-paragraph)
5070 [...] Any true wizard, faced with a sign like "Do not open this door.
5071 Really. We mean it. We're not kidding. Opening this door will mean the
5072 end of the universe," would /automatically/ open the door in order to see
5073 what all the fuss was about. This made signs a waste of time, but at least
5074 it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving
5075 relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, "We /told/ him not to."
5077 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5079 # p. 22 (the books are acting up while the Librarian is incapacitated and
5080 # now it's unsafe to go into the library)
5082 "But we're a university! We /have/ to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It
5083 adds /tone/. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the
5086 "Students," said the Senior Wrangler morosely.
5088 "Hah, I remember when I was a student," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
5089 "Old 'Bogeyboy' Swallett took us on an expedition to find the Lost Reading
5090 Room. Three weeks we were wandering around. We had to eat our own boots."
5092 "Did you find it?" said the Dean.
5094 "No, but we found the remains of the previous year's expedition."
5098 "We ate their boots, too."
5100 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5104 Death had taken to keeping Rincewind's lifetimer on a special shelf in his
5105 study, in much the way that a zoologist would want to keep an eye on a
5106 particularly intriguing specimen.
5108 The lifetimers of most people were the classic shape that Death thought
5109 was right and proper for the task. They appeared to be large eggtimers,
5110 although, since the sands they measured were the living seconds of
5111 someone's life, all the eggs were in one basket.
5113 Rincewind's hourglass looked like something created by a glassblower who'd
5114 had hiccups in a time machine. According to the amount of actual sand it
5115 contained--and Death was pretty good at making this kind of estimate--he
5116 should have died long ago. But strange curves and bends and extrusions of
5117 glass had developed over the years, and quite often the sand was flowing
5118 backwards, or diagonally. Clearly, Rincewind had been hit by so much
5119 magic, had been thrust reluctantly through time and space so often that
5120 he'd nearly bumped into himself coming the other way, that the precise end
5121 of his life was now as hard to find as the starting point on a roll of
5122 really sticky transparent tape.
5124 Death was familiar with the concept of the eternal, ever-renewed hero, the
5125 champion with a thousand faces. He'd refrained from commenting. He met
5126 heroes frequently, generally surrounded by, and this was important, the
5127 dead bodies of /very nearly/ all of their enemies and saying, "Vot the hell
5128 shust happened?" Whether there was some arrangement that allowed them to
5129 come back again afterwards was not something he would be drawn on.
5131 But he pondered whether, if this creature /did/ exist, it was somehow
5132 balanced by the eternal coward. The hero with a thousand retreating backs,
5133 perhaps. Many cultures had a legend of an undying hero who would one day
5134 rise again, so perhaps the balance of nature called for one who wouldn't.
5136 Whatever the ultimate truth of the matter, the fact now was that Death did
5137 not have the slightest idea of when Rincewind was going to die. This was
5138 very vexing to a creature who prided himself on his punctuality.
5140 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5144 A black and white bird appeared, and perched on his head.
5146 "You know what to do," said the old man.
5148 "Him? What a wonga," said the bird. "I've been lookin' at him. He's not
5149 even heroic. He's just in the right place at the right time."
5151 The old man indicated that this was maybe the definition of a hero.
5153 "All right, but why not go and get the thing yerself?" said the bird.
5155 "You've gotta have heroes," said the old man.
5157 "And I suppose I'll have to help," said the bird. It sniffed, which is
5158 quite hard to do through a beak.
5162 The bird shrugged, which /is/ easy to do if you have wings, and flew down
5163 off the old man's head. It didn't land on the rock but flew into it; for
5164 a moment there was a drawing of a bird, and then if faded.
5166 Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men
5167 that make gods. This explains a lot.
5169 The old man sat down and waited.
5171 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5175 She had a very straightforward view of foreign parts, or at least those
5176 more distant than her sister's house in Quirm where she spent a week's
5177 holiday every year. They were inhabited by people who were more to be
5178 pitied than blamed because, really, they were like children.(1) And they
5179 acted like savages.(2)
5181 (1) That is to say, she secretly considered them to be vicious, selfish
5184 (2) Again, when people like Mrs. Whitlow use this term they are not, for
5185 some inexplicable reason, trying to suggest that the subjects have a rich
5186 oral tradition, a complex system of tribal rights and a deep respect for
5187 the spirits of their ancestors. They are implying the kind of behavior
5188 more generally associated, oddly enough, with people wearing a full suit
5189 of clothes, often with the same sort of insignia.
5191 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5193 # p. 187 (last paragraph truncated)
5195 "I suppose he wouldn't have done anything stupid, would he?" he said.
5197 "Archchancellor, Ponder Stibbons is a fully trained wizard!" said the Dean.
5199 "Thank you for that very concise and definite answer, Dean," said Ridcully.
5201 [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
5207 %title Carpe Jugulum (8)
5208 # p. 10 (Harper Torch edition)
5210 Agnes tended to obey rules. Perdita didn't. Perdita thought that not
5211 obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like "Don't fall
5212 into this huge pit of spikes" were there for a purpose. [...]
5214 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5216 # p. 2 (example of the silliness and incomprehensability of the
5217 # Nac mac Feegle [aka pictsies, pict + pixie]; fortunately their
5218 # speech doesn't constitute much of the book's dialogue)
5222 "Ach, stickit yer trakkans!"
5224 "Gie you sich a kickin'!"
5228 "Dere c'n onlie be whin t'ousand!"
5230 "Nac mac Feegle wha hae!"
5232 "Wha hae yersel, ya boggin!"
5234 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5236 # p. 28 (from a discussion about whether Omnian priests still burn witches)
5238 "Hah! The leopard does not change his shorts, my girl!"
5240 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5244 Things were not what they seemed. But then, as Granny always said, they
5247 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5249 # pp. 254-255 ("verra comp-lic-ated" is accurate)
5251 "How can I ever repay you?" he said.
5253 The pixie's eyes gleamed happily.
5255 "Oh, there's a wee bitty thing the Carlin' Ogg said you could be givin' us,
5256 hardly important at all," he said.
5258 "Anything," said Verence.
5260 A couple of pixies came up staggering under a rolled-up parchment, which
5261 was unfolded in front of Verence. The old pixie was suddenly holding a
5264 "It's called a signature," he said, as Verence stared at the tiny
5265 handwriting. "An' make sure ye initial all the sub-clauses and codicils.
5266 We of the Nac mac Feegle are a simple folk," he added, "but we write verra
5267 comp-lic-ated documents."
5269 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5271 # p. 326 (Igor's lisp of "th" for "s" makes this /look/ intentionally archaic
5272 # although it wouldn't be pronounced that way)
5274 "What goeth around, cometh around," said Igor.
5276 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5278 # pp. 336-337 (the plot is driven by the actions of a family of vampyres
5279 # who do mostly cooperate with each other)
5281 Vampires are not naturally cooperative creatures. It's not in their nature.
5282 Every other vampire is a rival for the next meal. In fact, the ideal
5283 situation for a vampire is a world in which every other vampire has been
5284 killed off and no one seriously believes in vampires anymore. They are by
5285 nature as cooperative as sharks.
5287 Vampyres are just the same, the only real difference being that they can't
5290 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5294 "Be resolute, my dear," said the Count. "Remember--that which does not
5295 kill us can only make us stronger."
5297 "And that which /does/ kill us leaves us /dead/!" snarled Lacrimosa. "You
5298 saw what happened to the others! /You/ got your fingers burned!."
5300 [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
5306 %title The Fifth Elephant (9)
5308 You did something because it had always been done,
5309 and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way."
5310 A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?
5312 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5314 # p. 233 (Harper Torch edition) [this is a footnote]
5316 He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: It facinated
5317 people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and
5318 interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they
5319 created vast banquets in their imagination--but at the end of the day
5320 they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done and
5321 maybe had a slice of tomato.
5323 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5325 # pp. 80-81 (Harper Torch edition) [the pigeon is trained to carry messages]
5327 Constable Shoe saluted, but a litle testily. He'd been waiting rather a
5330 "Afternoon, Sergeant--"
5332 "That's Captain," said Captain Colon. "See the pip on my shoulder, Reg?"
5334 Reg looked closely. "I thought it was bird doings, Sarge."
5336 "That's Captain," said Colon Automatically. "It's only chalk now because
5337 I ain't got time to get it done properly," he said, "so don't be cheeky."
5341 A pigeon chose that diplomatic moment to flutter into the factory and land
5342 on Colon's shoulder, where it promoted him. [...]
5344 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5348 The wheels clattered over the wood of a drawbridge.
5350 As castles went, this looked as though it could be taken by a small squad
5351 of not very efficient soldiers. Its builder had not been thinking about
5352 fortifications. He'd been influenced by fairy tales and possibly by some
5353 of the more ornamental sorts of cake. It was a castle for looking at.
5354 For defense, putting a blanket over your head might be marginally safer.
5356 The coach stopped in the courtyard. [...]
5358 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5362 "What a mess," he said. "Locked-room mysteries are even worse when they
5363 leave the room unlocked."
5365 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5367 # p. 246 ([sic] 'rules for which he termed "the art..."' seems like it
5368 # ought to have been 'rules for _what_ he termed "the art..."')
5370 He punched the dwarf in the stomach. This was no time to play by the
5371 Marquis of Fantailler rules.(1)
5373 (1) The Marquis of Fantailler got into many fights in his youth, most of
5374 them as a result of being known as the Marquis of Fantailler, and wrote
5375 a set of rules for which he termed "the noble art of fisticuffs" which
5376 mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren't allowed to hit
5377 him. Many people were impressed with his work and later stood with noble
5378 chest outthrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against
5379 people who hadn't read the Marquis's book but /did/ know how to knock
5380 people senseless with a chair. The last words of a surprisingly large
5381 number of people were "Stuff the bloody Marquis of Fantailler--"
5383 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5387 Vimes shivered. He hadn't realized how warm it had been underground. Or
5388 what time it was. There was a dim, a very dim light. Was this just after
5389 sunset? What it almost dawn?
5391 The flakes were piling up on his damp clothes, driven by the wind.
5393 Freedom could get you killed.
5395 Shelter ... that was /essential/. The time of day and a precise location
5396 were of no use to the dead. They always knew what time it was and where
5399 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5405 Vimes blinked. A tall dark-robed figure was now sitting in the boat.
5409 IT'S THE SCYTHE, ISN'T IT. PEOPLE ALWAYS NOTICE THE SCYTHE.
5415 "/Possibly/? You turn up when people are /possibly/ going to die?"
5417 OH YES. IT'S QUITE THE NEW THING. IT'S BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTY
5424 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5426 # p. 288 [sic: missing 4th '.' at end]
5428 "Are you in charge of the Watch here?"
5430 "No. That's the job of the Burgermaster."
5432 "And who gives him /his/ orders?"
5434 "Everyone," said Tantony bitterly. Vimes nodded. Been there, he thought.
5435 Been there, done that, bought the dublet...
5437 [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
5443 %title The Truth (8)
5445 There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are
5446 those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this
5447 glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half
5450 The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say:
5451 What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I
5452 don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been
5455 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5458 The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.
5459 This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong.
5460 There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.
5462 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5464 # pp. 1-2 (Harper Torch edition)
5466 The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often
5467 spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire
5470 /The dwarfs can turn lead into gold.../
5474 It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.
5478 "Damned if I know. /I/ can't."
5480 "Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. /I/ wouldn't say, if /I/ could.
5488 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5490 # p. 10 ('mucky' is accurate)
5492 It would seem quite impossible, on such a mucky night, that there could
5493 have been anyone to witness this scene.
5495 But there was. The universe requires everything to be observed, lest it
5498 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5502 Very occasionally, a frog was removed from the vivarium and put into a
5503 rather smaller jar where it briefly became a very happy frog indeed, and
5504 then went to sleep and woke up in that great big jungle in the sky.
5506 And thus the university got the active ingredient that it made up into
5507 pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane. At least, /apparently/
5508 sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU. In fact he was
5509 incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continually, but by a
5510 remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned, in
5511 that case, that the whole business could be sorted out if only they could
5512 find a formula that caused him to /hallucinate that he was completely
5515 This had worked well. [...]
5517 (1) This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.
5519 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5521 # pp. 107-108 ('zis', 'zat', 'vhich', 'Latation' are all accurate)
5523 "Er ... why do you need to work in a darkroom, though?" he said. "The imps
5524 don't need it, do they?"
5526 "Ah, zis is for my experiment," said Otto proudly. "You know zat another
5527 term for an iconographer would be 'photographer'? From the old word
5528 'photus' in Latation, vhich means--"
5530 "To prance around like an idiot ordering everyone about as if you owned the
5531 place," said William.
5535 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5539 "Vy are ve stoppink?" said Otto.
5541 "That's Sergeant Detritus on the gate," said William.
5543 "Ah. A troll. Very stupid," opined Otto.
5545 "But hard to fool. I'm afraid we shall have to try the truth."
5547 "Vy vill that vork?"
5549 "He's a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don't often
5552 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5556 Mr. Tulip raised a trembling hand.
5558 "Is this the bit where my whole life passes in front of my eyes?" he said.
5560 NO, THAT WAS THE BIT JUST NOW.
5564 THE BIT, said Death, BETWEEN YOU BEING BORN AND YOU DYING. NO, THIS...
5565 MR. TULIP, THIS IS YOUR WHOLE LIFE AS IT PASSED BEFORE /OTHER PEOPLE'S/
5568 [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
5574 %title Thief of Time (8)
5576 "No running with scythes!"
5578 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5580 # p. 24 (Harper Torch edition)
5582 Silver stars weren't awarded frequently, and gold starts happened less
5583 than once a fortnight, and were vied for accordingly. Right now, Miss
5584 Susan selected a silver star. Pretty soon Vincent the Keen would have a
5585 galaxy of his very own. To give him his due, he was quite disinterested
5586 in which kind of star he got. Quantity, that was what he liked. Miss
5587 Susan had privately marked him down as Boy Most Likely To Be Killed One
5590 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5592 # p. 53 ('... with the chorus:', '"Do not act...' are separate paragraphs;
5593 # 'challanger' has been cowed after finding out that the little old
5594 # man he challanged--for entering the dojo--is actually Lu-Tze)
5596 As Lobsang followed the ambling Lu-Tze, he heard the dojo master, who like
5597 all teachers never missed an opportunity to drive home a lesson, say:
5598 "Dojo! What is Rule One?"
5600 Even the cowering challanger mumbled along with the chorus:
5602 "Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling
5605 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5607 # pp. 74-75 (the novices didn't know that the little old man known as Sweeper
5608 # is actually Lu-Tze; see passage 3 regarding Rule One)
5610 One day a group of senior novices, for mischief, kicked over the little
5611 shrine that Lu-Tze kept beside his sleeping mat.
5613 Next morning, no sweepers turned up for work. They stayed in their huts
5614 with the doors barred. After making inquiries, the abbot, who at that time
5615 was fifty years old again, summoned the three novices to his room. There
5616 were three brooms leaning against the wall. He spoke as follows:
5618 "You know that the dreadful Battle of Five Cities did not happen because
5619 the messenger got there in time?"
5621 They did. You learned this early in your studies. And they bowed
5622 nervously, because this was the abbot, after all.
5624 "And you know then that when the messenger's horse threw a shoe he espied
5625 a man trudging beside the road carrying a small portable forge and pushing
5626 an anvil on a barrow?"
5630 "And you know that man was Lu-tze?"
5634 "Surely you know that Janda Trapp, Grand Master of /Oki-doki/, /Toro-fu/,
5635 and /Chang-fu/, has only ever yielded to one man?"
5639 "And you know that man is Lu-Tze?"
5643 "You know the little shrine you kicked over last night?"
5647 "You know it had an owner?"
5649 There was silence. Then the brightest of the novices looked up at the
5650 abbot in horror, swallowed, picked up one of the three brooms, and walked
5653 The other two were slower of brain and had to follow the story all the way
5656 Then one of them said, "But it was only a sweeper's shrine!"
5658 "You will take up the brooms and sweep," said the abbot, "and you will
5659 sweep every day, and you will sweep until the day you find Lu-Tze and dare
5660 to say 'Sweeper, it was I who knocked over and scattered your shrine and
5661 now I will in humility accompany you to the dojo on the Tenth Djim, in
5662 order to learn the Right Way.' Only then, if you are still able, may you
5663 resume your studies here. Understood?"(1)
5665 Older monks sometimes complained, but someone would always say: "Remember
5666 that Lu-Tze's Way is not our Way. Remember he learned everything by
5667 sweeping unheeded while students were being educated. Remember, he has
5668 been everywhere and done many things. Perhaps he is a little... strange,
5669 but remember he walked into a citadel full of armed men and traps and
5670 nevertheless saw to it that the Pash of Muntab choked innocently on a fish
5671 bone. No monk is better than Lu-Tze at finding the Time and the Place."
5673 Some, who did not know, would say: "What is this Way that gives him so
5676 And they were told: "It is the Way of Mrs. Marietta Cosmopolite, 3 Quirm
5677 Street, Ankh-Morpork, Rooms To Rent Very Reasonable. No, we don't
5678 understand it, either. Some subsendential rubbish, apparently."
5680 (1) And the story continues: The novice who had protested that it was only
5681 the shrine of a sweeper ran away from the temple; the student who said
5682 nothing remained a sweeper for the rest of his life; and the student who
5683 has seen the inevitable shape of the story went, after much agonizing and
5684 several months of meticulous sweeping, to Lu-Tze and knelt and asked to be
5685 shown the Right Way. Whereupon the sweeper took him to the dojo of the
5686 Tenth Djim, with its terrible multibladed fighting machines and its
5687 fearsome serrated weapons such as the /clong-clong/ and the /uppsi/. The
5688 story runs that the sweeper then opened a cupboard at the back of the dojo
5689 and produced a broom and spake thusly: "One hand /here/ and the other
5690 /here/, understand? People never get it right. Use good, even strokes
5691 and let the broom do most of the work. Never try to sweep up a big pile,
5692 you'll end up sweeping every bit of dust twice. Use your dustpan wisely,
5693 and remember: a small brush for the corners."
5695 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5697 # p. 102 ('coming here': to the remote mountains where the monks live)
5699 "But did not Wen say that if the truth is anywhere, it is everywhere?" said
5702 "Well done. I see you learned /something/, at least. But one day it
5703 seemed to me that everyone else had decided that wisdom can only be found a
5704 long way off. So I went to Ankh-Morpork. They were all coming here, so it
5707 "Seeking /enlightenment/?"
5709 "No. The wise man does not seek enlightenment, he waits for it. So while
5710 I was waiting, it occurred to me that seeking perplexity might be more
5711 fun," said Lu-Tze. "After all, enlightenment begins where perplexity ends.
5712 And I found perplexity. And a kind of enlightenment, too. I had not been
5713 there for five minutes, for example, when some men in an alley tried to
5714 enlighten me of what little I possessed, giving me a valuable lesson in
5715 the ridiculousness of material things."
5717 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5719 # p. 286 (food in general, and chocolate in particular, has proven to be an
5720 # effective 'weapon' against Auditors who've taken on human form)
5722 "Let's get up into Zephyr Street," said Susan.
5724 "What is there for us?"
5726 "Wienrich and Boettcher."
5730 "I think the original Herr Wienrich and Frau Boettcher died a long time ago.
5731 But the shop still does very good business," said Susan, darting across the
5732 street. "We need ammunition."
5734 Lady LeJean caught up.
5736 "Oh. They make chocolate?" she said.
5738 "Does a bear poo in the woods?" said Susan and realized her mistake right
5741 Too late. Lady LeJean looked thoughtful for a moment.
5743 "Yes," she said at last. "Yes, I believe that most varieties do, indeed,
5744 excrete, as you suggest, at least in the temperate zones, but there are
5747 "I mean to say that, yes, they make chocolate," said Susan.
5749 (1) Teaching small children for any length of time can do this to a
5752 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5756 Kaos listened to history.
5758 There were new words. Wizards and philosophers had found Chaos, which is
5759 Kaos with his hair combed and a tie on, and had found in the epitome of
5760 disorder a new order undreamed of. /There are different kinds of rules./
5761 /From the simple comes the complex, and from the complex comes a different/
5762 /kind of simplicity. Chaos is order in a mask.../
5764 Chaos. Not dark, ancient Kaos, left behind by the evolving universe, but
5765 new, shiny Chaos, dancing in the heart of everything. The idea was
5766 strangely attractive. And it was a reason to go on living.
5768 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5770 # p. 355 (starts mid-paragraph, with a clause about eating in class omitted)
5772 [...] Susan [...] took the view that, if there were rules, they applied to
5773 everyone, even her. Otherwise they were merely tyranny. But rules were
5774 there to make you think before you broke them.
5776 [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
5781 # The Last Hero has never been released in the U.S. (or anywhere?) as a
5782 # conventional mass market paperback. The large (roughly 10" by 12")
5783 # trade paperback contains many full page color illustrations and most
5784 # text pages include decorations of varying degrees of elaborateness.
5785 # The actual text is probably only novella length.
5787 %title The Last Hero (7)
5788 # p. 41 (EOS edition)
5790 Too many people, when listing all the perils to be found in the search
5791 for lost treasure or ancient wisdom, had forgotten to put at the top of
5792 the list 'the man who arrived just before you'.
5794 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5797 # second paragraph is a bit "on the nose" but is too good to leave out
5799 The reason for the story was a mix of many things. There was humanity's
5800 desire to do forbidden deeds merely because they were forbidden.
5801 There was its desire to find new horizons and kill the people who live
5802 beyond them. There were the mysterious scrolls. There was the cucumber.
5803 But mostly there was the knowledge that one day, it would all be over.
5805 'Ah, well, life goes on,' people say when someone dies. But from the
5806 point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn't. It's the
5807 universe that goes on. Just as the deceased was getting the hang of
5808 everything it's all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one
5809 case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the imponderables of
5810 life, in the face of which people either start to pray...
5811 or become really, really angry.
5813 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5817 'And they're /heroes/,' said Mr Betteridge of the Guild of Historians.
5819 'And that means, exactly?' said the Patrician, sighing.
5821 'They're good at doing what they want to do.'
5823 'But they are also, as I understand it, very old men.'
5825 'Very old /heroes/,' the historian corrected him. 'That just means
5826 they've had a lot of /experience/ in doing what they want to do.
5828 Lord Vetinari sighed again. He did not like to live in a world of
5829 heroes. You had civilisation, such as it was, and you had heroes.
5831 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5835 They were, all of them, old men. Their background conversation was
5836 a litany of complaints about feet, stomachs and backs. They moved
5837 slowly. But they had a /look/ about them. It was in their eyes.
5839 Their eyes said that wherever it was, they had been there. Whatever
5840 it was, they had done it, sometimes more than once. But they would
5841 never, ever, /buy/ the T-shirt. And they /did/ know the meaning of
5842 the word 'fear'. It was something that happened to other people.
5844 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5848 Captain Carrot saluted. 'Force is always the last resort, sir,' he said.
5850 'I believe for Cohen it's the first choice,' said Lord Vetinari.
5852 'He's not too bad if you don't come up behind him suddenly,' said Rincewind.
5854 'Ah, there is the voice of our mission specialist,' said the Patrician.
5855 'I just hope-- What is that on your badge, Captain Carrot?'
5857 'Mission motto, sir,' said Carrot cheerfully. '/Morituri Nolumus Mori/.
5858 Rincewind suggested it.'
5860 'I imagine he did,' said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly.
5861 'And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind?'
5863 'Er...' Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape. 'Er...
5864 roughly speaking, it means, "We who are about to die don't want to", sir.'
5866 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5868 # p. 125 (near top, then continued half way down)
5870 'A good wizard, Rincewind,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. 'Not
5871 particularly bright, but, frankly, I've never been quite happy with
5872 intelligence. An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.'
5874 Ponder's ears went red.
5878 'Mr Stibbons was right, was he?' said Ridcully, staring at Ponder. 'How
5879 did you work that out so /exactly/, Mr Stibbons?'
5881 'I, er...' Ponder felt the eyes of the wizards on him. 'I--' He stopped.
5882 'It was a lucky guess, sir.'
5884 The wizards relaxed. They were extremely uneasy with cleverness, but
5885 lucky guessing was what being a wizard was all about.
5887 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5891 Evil Harry looked down and shuffled his feet, his face a battle between
5894 'Good of you to say that, lads,' he mumbled. 'I mean, you know, if it
5895 was up to me I wouldn't do this to yer, but I got a reputation to--'
5897 'I said we /understand/,' said Cohen. 'It's just like with us. You see
5898 a big hairy thing galloping towards you, you don't stop to think: Is
5899 this a rare species on the point of extinction? No, you hack its head
5900 off. 'Cos that's heroing, am I right? An' /you/ see someone, you
5901 betray 'em, quick as a wink. 'Cos that's villaining.'
5903 [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
5909 %title The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (1)
5911 The important thing about adventures, thought Mr Bunnsy, was that they
5912 shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes.
5914 [The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett]
5920 %title Night Watch (7)
5922 When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend.
5924 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
5926 # pp. 2-4 (Harper Torch edition; omitted section describes how the student
5927 # assassin, who has fallen off a booby-trapped shed roof into a
5928 # cesspit, is on an assignment to try to get into position to
5929 # target Vimes but not actually attack or try to kill him)
5931 "You're a bit young to be sent on this contract, aren't you?" said Vimes.
5933 "Not a contract, sir," said Jocasta, still paddling.
5935 "Come now, Miss Wiggs. The price on my head is at least--"
5937 "The Guild council put it in abeyance, sir," said the patient swimmer.
5938 "You're off the register. They're not accepting contracts on you at
5943 "And quite a few of the traps drop you into something deadly," said Vimes.
5945 "Lucky for me that I fell into this one, eh, sir?"
5947 "Oh, that one's deadly too," said Vimes. "/Eventually/ deadly." He
5948 sighed. He really wanted to discourage this sort of thing but... they'd
5949 put him off the register? It wasn't that he'd /liked/ being shot at by
5950 hooded figures in the temporary employ of his many and varied enemies,
5951 but he'd always looked at it as some kind of vote of confidence. It
5952 showed that he was annoying the rich and arrogant people who ought to be
5955 Besides, the Assassin's Guild was easy to outwit. They had strict rules,
5956 which they followed quite honorably, and this was fine by Vimes, who, in
5957 certain practical matters, had no rules whatever.
5959 Off the register, eh? The only other person not on it anymore, it was
5960 rumored, was Lord Vetinari, the Patrician. The Assassins understood the
5961 political game in the city better than anyone, and if they took you off
5962 the register it was because they felt that your departure would not only
5963 spoil the game but also smash the board.
5965 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
5967 # p. 12 (some trainee Watchmen have been taught a marching/running song by
5968 # Sergeant Detritus, a troll; trolls count "one, two, many, lots"
5969 # and evidently can't go any higher)
5971 "/Now we sing dis stupid song!/
5972 /Sing it as we run along!/
5973 /Why we sing dis we don't know!/
5974 /We can't make der words rhyme prop'ly!/"
5982 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
5986 Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it.
5987 That was how you maintained your authority--everyone, talking to a copper,
5988 was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their
5989 forehead. You couldn't, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag
5990 someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they
5991 told you what it was.
5993 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
5995 # p. 138 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
5997 [...] Doctor Lawn was wearing a face mask and holding a pair of very long
5998 tweezers in his hand.
6002 "I'm going out," said Vimes. "Trouble?"
6004 "Not too bad. Slidey Harris was unlucky at cards last night, that's all.
6005 Played the ace of hearts."
6007 "That's an unlucky card?"
6009 "It is if Big Tony knows he didn't deal it to you. But I'll soon have it
6012 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
6014 # p. 141 ('it' is a piece of paper concealed inside one of CMOT Dibbler's
6015 # "meat" pies, partly eaten by Vimes but intended for someone else)
6017 He unfolded it. In smudged pencil, but still readable, it read:
6018 /Morphic Street, 9 o'clock tonight. Password: Swordfish/.
6020 Swordfish? Every password was "swordfish"! Whenever anyone tried to
6021 think of a word that no one would ever guess, they /always/ chose
6022 "swordfish." It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind.
6024 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
6026 # p. 345 (text actually has "worth more *that* AM$10,000"--obviously a typo)
6028 There were rules. When you had a Guild of Assassins, there had to be rules
6029 that everyone knew and that were never, ever broken.(1)
6031 An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one--black clothes, hood,
6032 boots, and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what
6033 could anyone do but spend all day sitting in a small room with a loaded
6034 crossbow pointed at the door?
6036 And they couldn't kill a man incapable of defending himself (although a
6037 man worth more than AM$10,000 a year was considered automatically capable
6038 of defending himself or at least of employing people who were).
6040 And they had to give the target a chance.
6042 (1) Sometimes, admittedly, for a given value of "never."
6044 [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
6050 %title The Wee Free Men (9)
6051 # p. 100 (HarperTempest edition; quin==queen;
6052 # this rallying cry occurs multiple times; p. 167 has "/Nae quin!
6053 # Nae king! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!/",
6054 # p. 193 has same except that King and Quin are reversed and
6055 # capitalized, p. 287 has "/Nae Quin! Nae Laird! Wee Fee Men!/")
6057 "Nac Mac Feegle! The Wee Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae
6058 master! /We willna be fooled again!/"
6060 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6062 # pp. 18-19 (unlike in Lancre and its surrounding Ramtop mountains, witches
6063 # are unwelcome in the Chalk; the first paragraph continues with
6064 # mention of things Miss Tick doesn't carry, then things she does,
6065 # ending with 'and, of course, a lucky charm.')
6067 Miss Tick did not look like a witch. Most witches don't, at least the ones
6068 who wander from place to place. Looking like a witch can be dangerous when
6069 you walk among the uneducated. [...]
6071 Everyone in the country carried lucky charms, and Miss Tick had worked out
6072 that if you didn't have one, people would suspect that you /were/ a witch.
6073 You had to be a bit cunning to be a witch.
6075 Miss Tick did have a pointy hat, but it was a stealth hat and pointed only
6076 when she wanted it to.
6078 The one thing in her bag that might have made anyone suspicious was a very
6079 small, grubby booklet entitled /An Introduction to Escapology, by the
6080 Great Williamson/. If one of the risks of your job is being thrown into a
6081 pond with your hands tied together, then the ability to swim thirty yards
6082 underwater, fully clothed, plus the ability to lurk under the weeds
6083 breathing air through a hollow reed, count as nothing if you aren't also
6084 /amazingly/ good at knots.
6086 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6088 # pp. 29-30 ('pune' is accurate; a mispronunciation of 'pun', as indicated
6089 # by the footnote; one wonders how a nine year old farm girl knows
6090 # how to pronounce 'mystique'...)
6092 "My name," she said at last, "is Miss Tick. And I /am/ a witch. It's a
6093 good name for a witch, of course."
6095 "You mean blood-sucking parasite?" said Tiffany, wrinkling her forehead.
6097 "I'm sorry," said Miss Tick, coldly.
6099 "Ticks," said Tiffany. "Sheep get them. But if you use turpentine--"
6101 "I /meant/ that it /sounds/ like 'mystic,'" said Miss Tick.
6103 "Oh, you mean a pune, or play on words," said Tiffany.(1) "In that case it
6104 would be even better if you were Miss /Teak/, a dense foreign wood, because
6105 that would sound like 'mystique,' or you could be Miss Take, which would--"
6107 "I can see we're going to get on like a house on fire," said Miss Tick.
6108 "There may be no survivors."
6110 (1) Tiffany had read lots of words in the dictionary that she'd never heard
6111 spoken, so she had to guess at how they were pronounced.
6113 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6117 There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overhead and
6118 there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because
6119 she'd read in the Almanack that /gibbous/ means what the moon looked like
6120 when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of
6121 paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to
6122 herself, "Ah, I see the moon's very gibbous tonight."
6124 It's possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want
6127 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6129 # p. 159 (bigjob: pictsie term for human; 'heid', 'dinna', 'canna', 'noo',
6130 # 'aroound', and 'Tiffan' are accurate)
6132 "[...] Ye have the First Sight and the Second Thoughts, just like yer
6133 Granny. That's rare in a bigjob."
6135 "Don't you mean Second Sight?" Tiffany asked. "Like people who can see
6138 "Ach, no. That's typical bigjob thinking. /First Sight/ is when you can
6139 see what's really there, not what your heid tells you /ought/ to be there.
6140 Ye saw Jenny, ye saw the horseman, ye saw them as real thingies. Second
6141 sight is dull sight, it's seeing only what you expect to see. Most bigjobs
6142 ha' that. Listen to me, because I'm fadin' noo and there's a lot you dinna
6143 ken. Ye think this is the whole world? That is a good thought for sheep
6144 and mortals who dinna open their eyes. Because in truth there are more
6145 worlds than stars in the sky. Understand? They are everywhere, big and
6146 small, close as your skin. They are /everywhere/. Some ye can see an'
6147 some ye canna, but there are doors, Tiffan. They might be a hill or a
6148 tree or a stone or a turn in the road, or they might e'en be a thought in
6149 yer heid, but they are there, all aroound ye. You'll have to learn to see
6150 'em, because you walk among them and dinna know it. And some of them...
6153 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6155 # p. 193 (source text is all italics here; passage continues with the speakers
6156 # getting in synch and shouting the cry from passage 1)
6158 "They can tak' oour lives but they canna tak' oour troousers!"
6160 "Ye'll tak' the high road an' I'll tak' yer wallet!"
6162 "There can only be one t'ousand!"
6164 "Ach, stick it up yer trakkans!"
6166 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6168 # p. 227 (also all italics; end of a reminiscence of Granny Aching by Tiffany)
6170 "Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up
6171 for them as has no voices."
6173 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6175 # p. 287 (like passage 6, this ties back to passage 1; the cry there is
6176 # one of the things Tiffany hears)
6178 Tiffany might have been the only person, in all the worlds that there are,
6179 to be happy to hear the sound of the Nac Mac Feegle.
6181 They poured out of the smashed nut. Some were still wearing bow ties.
6182 Some were back in their kilts. But they were all in a fighting mood and,
6183 to save time, were fighting with one another to get up to speed.
6185 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6187 # pp. 313-314 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'mebbe' and 'oour' are accurate)
6189 "[...] Can you bring Wentworth?"
6193 "And you won't get lost or--or drunk or anything?"
6195 Rob Anybody looked offended. "We ne'er get lost!" he said. "We always ken
6196 where we are! It's just sometimes mebbe we aren't sure where everything
6197 else is, but it's no' our fault if /everything else/ gets lost! The Nac
6198 Mac Feegle never get lost!"
6200 "What about drunk?" said Tiffany, dragging Roland toward the lighthouse.
6202 "We've ne'er been lost in oour lives! Is that no' the case, lads?" said
6203 Rob Anybody. There was a murmur of resentful agreement. "The words /lost/
6204 and /Nac Mac Feegle/ shouldna turn up in the same sentence!"
6206 "And drunk?" said Tiffany again, laying Roland down on the beach.
6208 "Gettin' lost is something that happens to other people!" declared Rob
6209 Anybody. "I want to make that point perfectly clear!"
6211 [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
6217 %title Monstrous Regiment (8)
6219 'How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don't know how
6222 'Not me, sir. Other people. They see the sword and don't attack me,'
6223 said Maladict patiently.
6225 'Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn't be any good with it,' said the
6228 'No, sir. I'd probably settle for just ripping their heads off, sir.
6229 That's what I mean by protection, sir. Theirs, not mine. And I'd get
6230 hell from the League if I did that, sir.'
6232 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6234 # p. 6 (Harper Torch edition)
6236 /There was always a war./ Usually they were border disputes, the national
6237 equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow
6238 too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving
6239 country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had
6240 to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn't be fighting
6241 them, eh? There was always a war.
6243 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6245 # pp. 115-116 (plural 'forests' is odd but accurate [1st sentence];
6246 # so is 'knew' which ought to be 'known' [4th paragraph];
6247 # 9 '0's and 7 '0's are accurate too)
6249 A pigeon rose over the forests, banked slightly, and headed straight for
6250 the valley of the Kneck.
6252 Even from here, the black stone bulk of the Keep was visible, rising above
6253 the sea of trees. The pigeon sped on, one spark of purpose in the fresh
6256 --and squawked as darkness dropped from the sky, gripping it in talons of
6257 steel. Buzzard and pigeon tumbled for a moment, and then the buzzard
6258 gained a little height and flapped onwards.
6260 The pigeon thought: 000000000. But had it been more capable of coherent
6261 thought, and knew something about how birds of prey caught pigeons,(1) it
6262 might have wondered why it was being gripped so... kindly. It was being
6263 held, not squeezed. As it was, all it could think was 0000000!
6265 (1) And allowing for the fact that all pigeons who knew how birds of prey
6266 catch pigeons are dead, and therefore capable of slightly less thought
6267 than a living pigeon.
6269 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6273 "All the food's been taken but there's carrots and parsnips in a little
6274 garden down the hill a bit," Shufti said as they walked away.
6276 "It'd be s-stealing from the dead," said Wazzer.
6278 "Well, if they object they can hold on, can't they?" said Shufti. "They're
6279 underground already!"
6281 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6285 "And there you have it, Sergeant Towering," said the lieutenant, turning
6286 to the prisoner. "Of course, we all know there is some atrocious behavior
6287 in times of war, but it is not the sort of thing we would expect of a
6288 royal prince.(1) If we are to be pursued because a gallant young soldier
6289 prevented matters from becoming even more disgusting, then so be it."
6291 (1) Lieutenant Blouse read only the more technical history books.
6293 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6295 # p. 176 (fire: almost certainly to make tea)
6297 There are three things a soldier wants to do when there's a respite on the
6298 road. One involves lighting a cigarette, one involves lighting a fire,
6299 and the other involves no flames at all but does, generally, require a
6302 (1) Technically, a tree is not required, but seems to be insisted upon for
6305 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6307 # p. 179 ('humor': American spelling is accurate)
6309 Maladict dropped his crossbow, which fired straight up into the air,(1)
6310 and sat down with his head in his hands.
6312 (1) And failed to hit anything, especially a duck. This is so unusual
6313 in situations like this that it must be reported under the new humor
6314 regulations. If it had hit a duck, which quacked and landed on somebody's
6315 head, this would, of course, have been very droll and would certainly have
6316 been reported. Instead, the arrow drifted in the breeze a little on the
6317 way and landed in an oak tree some thirty feet away, where it missed a
6320 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6322 # p. 284 (soldiers disguised as washerwomen in order to sneak into an
6323 # enemy-controlled castle have been put to work doing the laundry)
6325 "Look at this, will you?" said Shufti, waving a sodden pair of men's long
6326 pants at her. "They keep putting the colors in with the whites."
6328 "Well, so what? These are /enemy/ long johns," said Polly.
6330 "Yes, but there's such a thing as doing it properly! Look, they put in
6331 this red pair and all the others are going pink."
6333 "And? I used to love pink when I was about seven."(1)
6335 "But pale pink? On a man?"
6337 Polly looked at the next tub for a moment and patted Shufti on the shoulder.
6339 "Yes. It is /very/ pale, isn't it? You'd better find a couple more red
6342 "But that'll make it even worse--" Shufti began.
6344 "That was an /order/, soldier," Polly whispered in her ear. "And add some
6351 (1) It is an established fact that, despite everything society can do,
6352 girls of seven are magnetically attracted to the color pink.
6354 [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
6360 %title A Hat Full of Sky (11)
6361 # p. 405 (HarperTempest edition)
6363 Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the
6364 place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there
6365 see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the
6366 same as never leaving.
6368 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6372 Miss Tick was a sort of witch finder. That seemed to be how witchcraft
6373 worked. Some witches kept a magical lookout for girls who showed promise,
6374 and found them an older witch to help them along. They didn't teach you
6375 how to do it. They taught you how to know what you were doing.
6377 Witches were a bit like cats. They didn't much like one another's company,
6378 but they /did/ like to know where all the other witches were, just in case
6379 they needed them. And what you might need them for was to tell you, as a
6380 friend, that you were beginning to cackle.
6382 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6386 "Oh," said Miss Tick. But because she was a teacher as well as a witch,
6387 and probably couldn't help herself, she added, "The funny thing is, of
6388 course, that officially there is no such thing as a white horse. They're
6391 (1) She had to say that because she was a witch and a teacher, and that's
6392 a terrible combination. They want things to be /right/. They like things
6393 to be /correct/. If you want to upset a witch, you don't have to mess
6394 around with charms and spells--you just have to put her in a room with a
6395 picture that's hung slightly crooked and watch her squirm.
6397 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6401 "Oh," she said. "It's like cat's cradle."
6403 "You've played that, have you?" said Miss Tick vaguely, still
6406 "I can do all the common shapes," said Tiffany. "The Jewels and the
6407 Cradle and the House and the Flock and the Three Old Ladies, One With a
6408 Squint, Carrying the Bucket of Fish to Market When They Meet the Donkey,
6409 although you need two people for that one, and I only ever did it once,
6410 and Betsy Tupper scratched her nose at the wrong moment and I had to get
6411 some scissors to to cut her loose..."
6413 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6415 # p. 106 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'doon' is accurate)
6417 "[...] It's a bad case o' the thinkin' he's caught, missus. When a man
6418 starts messin' wi' the readin' and the writin', then he'll come doon with
6419 a dose o' the thinkin' soon enough. I'll fetch some o' the lads and we'll
6420 hold his head under water until he stops doin' it--'tis the only cure. It
6421 can kill a man, the thinkin'."
6423 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6425 # p. 107 ('braked', 'Polis'men', 'dinna' all accurate)
6427 "I never braked my word yet," said Rob. "Except to Polis'men and other o'
6428 that kidney, ye ken, and they dinna count."
6430 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6432 # p. 111 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'land o' the living': the Nac Mac
6433 # Feegle believe that they're dead and are on Discworld because it
6434 # is heaven, also that if they die on Discworld they'll be reborn
6435 # on their "real world"; 'big wee hag': Tiffany, apprentice witch
6436 # [big: she's human, wee: she's still a child, hag: she's a witch])
6438 "[...] Now lads, ye ken all about hivers. They cannae be killed! But
6439 'tis oor duty to save the big wee hag, so this is, like, a sooey-side
6440 mission and ye'll probably all end up back in the land o' the living
6441 doin' a borin' wee job. So... I'm askin' for volunteers!"
6443 Every Feegle over the age of four automatically put his hand up.
6445 "Oh, come /on/," said Rob. "You canna /all/ come! Look, I'll tak'...
6446 Daft Wullie, Big Yan, and you... Awf'ly Wee Billy Bigchin. An' I'm takin'
6447 no weans, so if yez under three inches high, ye're not comin'! Except
6448 for ye, o' course, Awf'ly Wee Billy. As for the rest of youse, we'll
6449 settle this the traditional Feegle way. I'll tak' the last fifty men
6452 He beckoned the chosen three to a place in the corner of the mound while
6453 the rest of the crowd squared up cheerfully. A Feegle liked to face
6454 enormous odds all by himself, because it meant you didn't have to look
6455 where you were hitting.
6457 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6459 # p. 114 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
6461 [...] It was a mad, desperate plan, which was very dangerous and risky
6462 and would require tremendous strength and bravery to make it work.
6464 Put like that, they agreed to it instantly.
6466 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6468 # p. 225 (last paragraph continues--they didn't understand the contents
6469 # since most pictsies can't read)
6471 "Oh, aye?" he said. "We looked at her diary loads o' times. Nae harm
6474 "You /looked/ at her /diary/?" said Miss Level, horrified. "Why?"
6476 Really, she though later, she should have expected the answer.
6478 "Cuz it wuz locked," said Daft Wullie. "If she didna want anyone tae look
6479 at it, why'd she keep it at the back o' her sock drawer? [...]"
6481 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6483 # p. 240 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'frannit' is accurate)
6485 "[...] All we need tae do is frannit a wheelstone on it and it'll tak' us
6486 right where she is."(1)
6488 (1) If anyone knew what this meant, they'd know a lot more about the Nac
6489 Mac Feegle's way of traveling.
6491 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6493 # p. 351 (the hiver's dialog is telepathic--internal would be more
6494 # accurate--and occurs in italics without quote marks)
6496 Tiffany took a deep breath. This was about words, and she knew about
6497 words. "Here is a story to believe," she said. "Once we were blobs in
6498 the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys,
6499 and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand
6500 once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and
6501 the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood
6502 is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we're frightened, the
6503 hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We /are/
6504 history! Everything we've ever been on the way to becoming us, we still
6505 are. Would you like to hear the rest of the story?"
6507 /Tell us/, said the hiver.
6509 "I'm made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my
6510 ancestors. They're in the way I look, in the color of my hair. And I'm
6511 made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think. So who
6514 [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
6520 %title Going Postal (13)
6522 What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of
6523 a finger? Where was the magic in that? It was mumbled words and weird
6524 drawings in old books and in the wrong hands it was dangerous as hell,
6525 but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands.
6527 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6529 # p. 5 (Harper Torch edition)
6531 They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates
6532 a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably
6533 concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is
6536 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6540 There is a saying, "You can't fool an honest man," which is much quoted
6541 by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Moist
6542 never tried it, knowingly anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he
6543 tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder
6544 to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer, and somehow, more
6545 sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly
6548 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6550 # p. 47 (passage starts mid-paragraph;
6551 # italics because it's Moist von Lipwig's internal monolog)
6553 /What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch
6554 of government? Apart from, say, the average voter./
6556 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6560 Now he could see the mysterious order clearly. They were robed, of course,
6561 because you couldn't have a secret order without robes. They had pushed
6562 the hoods back now, and each man(1) was wearing a peaked cap with a bird
6563 skeleton wired to it.
6565 (1) Women are always significantly underrepresented in secret orders.
6567 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6569 # p. 184 ('Tubso' and 'Bissonomy' are accurate)
6571 Just below the dome, staring down from their niches, were statues of the
6572 Virtues: Patience, Chastity, Silence, Charity, Hope, Tubso, Bissonomy,(1)
6575 (1) Many cultures practice neither of these in the hustle and bustle of
6576 the modern world, because no one can remember what they are.
6578 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6580 # pp. 249-250 (Moist and Miss Dearheart are in a fancy restaurant)
6582 She froze, staring over his shoulder. He saw her right hand scrabble
6583 frantically among the cutlery and grab a knife.
6585 "That bastard has just walked into the place!" she hissed. "Reacher Gilt!
6586 I'll just kill him and join you for the pudding..."
6588 "You can't do that!" hissed Moist.
6592 "You're using the wrong knife! That's for the fish! You'll get into
6595 She glared at him, but her hand relaxed, and something like a smile
6596 appeared on her face.
6598 "They don't have a knife for stabbing rich, murdering bastards?" she said.
6600 "They bring it to the table when you order one," said Moist urgently.
6601 "Look, this isn't the Drum, they don't just throw the body into the river!
6602 They'll call the Watch! Get a grip. Not on a knife! And get ready to
6607 "Because I forged his signature on Grand Trunk notepaper to get us in
6610 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6612 # pp 260-261 (Mr. Groat: elderly postal employee recently attacked in
6613 # the palacial but severely dilapidated post office;
6614 # "his imagination": Moist's; "him": Mr. Groat; "he": Moist)
6616 The vision of Mr. Groat's chest kept bumping insistently against his
6617 imagination. It looked as though something with claws had taken a swipe
6618 at him, and only the thick uniform coat prevented him from being opened
6619 like a clam. But that didn't sound like a vampire. They weren't messy
6620 like that. It was a waste of good food.
6622 Nevertheless, he picked up a piece of smashed chair. It had splintered
6623 nicely. And the nice thing about a stake through the heart was that it
6624 also worked on non-vampires.
6626 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6628 # p. 262 (Stanley, a young postal employee who collects pins, recently
6629 # fought off /something/ using a bag of pins as a weapon)
6630 # [this passage doesn't have a very satisfactory ending...]
6632 You probably couldn't /kill/ a vampire with pins...
6634 And after a thought like that is when you realize that however hard you
6635 try to look behind you, there's a behind you, behind you, where you aren't
6636 looking. Moist flung his back to the cold stone wall where he slithered
6637 along it until he ran out of wall and acquired a doorframe.
6639 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6641 #p. 278 ('thoughted' and 'thoughting' are accurate)
6645 It is not often that a wailing woman rushes into a room and throws herself
6646 at a man. It had never happened to Moist before. Now it happened, and it
6647 seemed such a waste that the woman was Miss Maccalariat.
6649 She tottered forward and clung to the startled Moist, tears streaming down
6652 "Oh, Mr. Lipwig!" she wailed. "Oh, Mr. Lipwig!"
6654 Moist reeled under her weight. She was dragging at his collar so hard
6655 that he was likely to end up on the floor, and the thought of being found
6656 on the floor with Miss Maccalariat was--well, a thought that just couldn't
6657 be thoughted. The head would explode before thoughting it.
6659 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6663 Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same
6664 crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.
6666 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6668 # p. 326 (homage to "To Have and Have Not"; Lauren Bacall's character says
6669 # to Humphrey Bogart's character, "You know how to whistle, don't
6670 # you Steve? Just put your lips together and--blow."
6671 # Miss Dearheart's slight pause seems better placed...)
6673 Miss Dearheart stubbed out her cigarette. "Go up there tonight, Mr. Lipwig.
6674 Get yourself a little bit closer to heaven. And then get down on your
6675 knees and pray. You know how to pray, don't you? You just put your hands
6676 together--and hope."
6678 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6680 # p. 333 ('crackers' have been sending and receiving clandestine clacks
6681 # messages without owners/operators of the clacks network noticing)
6683 It was a little like stealing. It was exactly like stealing. It was, in
6684 fact, stealing. But there was no law against it, because no one knew the
6685 crime existed, so is it really stealing if what's stolen isn't missed?
6686 And is it stealing if you're stealing from thieves? Anyway, all property
6687 is theft, except mine.
6689 [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
6696 # p. 39 (Harper Torch edition; passage starts mid-paragraph; speaker is Nobby)
6698 "Why mess about with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?"
6700 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6702 # pp. 334-336 (originally transcribed from some other edition)
6704 He wanted to sleep. He'd never felt this tired before. Vimes slumped to
6705 his knees, and then fell sideways on to the sand.
6707 When he forced his eyes open, he saw pale stars above him, and had, once
6708 again, the sensation that there was someone else present.
6710 He turned his head, wincing at the stab of pain, and saw a small but
6711 brightly lit folding chair on the sand. A robed figure was reclining in
6712 it, reading a book. A scythe was stuck in the sand beside it.
6714 A white, skeletal hand turned a page.
6716 'You'll be Death, then?' said Vimes, after a while.
6718 AH, MISTER VIMES, ASTUTE AS EVER. GOT IT IN ONE, said Death, shutting the
6719 book on his finger to keep the place.
6721 'I've seen you before.'
6723 I HAVE WALKED WITH YOU MANY TIMES, MISTER VIMES.
6725 'And this is /it/, is it?'
6727 HAS IT NEVER STRUCK YOU THAT THE CONCEPT OF A WRITTEN NARRATIVE IS SOMEWHAT
6728 STRANGE? said Death.
6730 Vimes could tell when people were trying to avoid something they really
6731 didn't want to say, and it was happening here.
6733 'Is it?' he insisted. 'Is this it? This time I die?'
6737 'Could be? What sort of answer is that?' said Vimes.
6739 A VERY ACCURATE ONE. YOU SEE, YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE,
6740 WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR-/VIMES/ EXPERIENCE.
6741 DON'T MIND ME. CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING. I HAVE A BOOK.
6743 Vimes rolled over on to his stomach, gritted his teeth, and pushed himself
6744 on to his hands and knees again. He managed a few yards before slumping
6747 He heard the sound of a chair being moved.
6749 'Shouldn't you be somewhere else?' he said.
6751 I AM, said Death, sitting down again.
6755 AS WELL. Death turned a page and, for a person without breath, managed a
6756 pretty good sigh. IT APPEARS THAT THE BUTLER DID IT.
6760 IT IS A MADE-UP STORY. VERY STRANGE. ALL ONE NEEDS TO DO IS TURN TO THE
6761 LAST PAGE AND THE ANSWER IS THERE. WHAT, THEREFORE, IS THE POINT OF
6762 DELIBERATEDLY NOT KNOWING?
6764 It sounded like gibberish to Vimes, so he ignored it. Some of the aches
6765 had gone, although his head still hammered. There was an empty feeling
6766 everywhere. He just wanted to sleep.
6768 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6772 And I'm going home, Vimes repeated to himself. Everyone wants something
6773 from Vimes, even though I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hell,
6774 I'm probably a spoon. Well I'm going to be Vimes, and Vimes reads
6775 /Where's My Cow?/ to Young Sam at six o'clock. With the noises done right.
6777 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6781 Fred Colon peered through the bars. He was, on the whole, a pretty good
6782 jailer; he always had a pot of tea on the go, he was, as a general rule,
6783 amiably disposed to most people, he was too slow to be easily fooled, and
6784 he kept the cell keys in a box in the bottom drawer of his desk, a long
6785 way out of reach of any stick, hand, dog, cunningly thrown belt, or
6786 trained Klatchian monkey spider.(1)
6788 (1) Making Fred Colon possibly unique in the annals of jail history.
6790 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6792 # p. 287 (American spelling of 'theater' is accurate [Harper Torch edition])
6794 Brushing aside cobwebs with one hand and holding up a lantern with the
6795 other, Sybil led the way past boxes of MEN'S BOOTS, VARIOUS; RISIBLE
6796 PUPPETS, STRING & GLOVE; MODEL THEATER AND SCENERY. Maybe that was the
6797 reason for their wealth: they bought things that were built to last, and
6798 now they seldom had to buy anything at all. Except food, of course, and
6799 even then Vimes would not have been surprised to see boxes labeled APPLE
6800 CORES, VARIOUS, or LEFTOVERS, NEED EATING UP.(1)
6802 (1) That was a phrase of Sybil's that got to him. She'd announce at lunch,
6803 "we must have the pork tonight, it needs eating up." Vimes never had an
6804 actual problem with this, because he'd been raised to eat what was put in
6805 front of him, and do it quickly, too, before someone else snatched it away.
6806 He was just puzzled at the suggestion that he was there to do the food a
6809 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6813 "Tell me Drumknott, are you a betting man at all?"
6815 "I have been know to have the occasional 'little flutter,' sir."
6817 "Given, then, a contest between an invisible and very powerful quasidemonic
6818 /thing/ of pure vengence on the one hand, and the commander on the other,
6819 where would you wager, say... one dollar?"
6821 "I wouldn't, sir. That looks like one that would go to the judges."
6823 "Yes," said Vetinari, staring thoughtfully at the closed door. "Yes,
6826 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6828 # p. 351 ('teeth-aching' probably ought to have been 'teeth-achingly')
6830 Vimes reached up and took a mug of water from Angua. It was teeth-aching
6831 cold and the best drink he'd ever tasted. And his mind worked fast, flying
6832 in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a
6833 huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened
6834 and, if it had happened, hadn't happened very much.
6836 It was all mystic, that's what it was. Oh, it /might/ all be true, but how
6837 could you ever tell? You had to stick to the things you can see. And you
6838 had to keep reminding yourself of that, too.
6840 Yeah, that was it. What had really happened, eh? A few signs? Well,
6841 anything can look like you want it to, if you're worried and confused
6842 enough, yes? A sheep can look like a cow, right? Ha!
6844 [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
6850 %title Wintersmith (16)
6851 # p. 82 (HarperTeen edition--presumably HarperTempest suffered a name change)
6853 That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your
6854 head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as
6855 granite, or is it sandstone?
6857 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6861 They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but
6862 has anyone checked lately?
6864 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6868 All witches are a bit odd. Tiffany had got used to odd, so that odd seemed
6869 quite normal. There was Miss Level, for example, who had two bodies,
6870 although one of them was imaginery. Mistress Pullunder, who bred pedigreed
6871 earthworms and gave them all names... well, she was hardly odd at all, just
6872 a bit peculiar, and anyway earthworms were quite interesting in a basically
6873 uninterestng kind of way. And there had been Old Mother Dismass, who
6874 suffered from bouts of temporal confusion, which can be quite strange when
6875 it happens to a witch; her mouth never moved in time with her words, and
6876 sometimes her footsteps came down the stairs ten minutes before she did.
6878 But when it came to odd, Miss Treason didn't just take the cake, but a
6879 packet of biscuits too, with sprinkles on the top, and also a candle.
6881 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6883 # p. 34 ('villages': plural is accurate; 'clonk-clank' is rendered bold)
6885 Then there was her clock. It was heavy and made of rusty iron by someone
6886 who was more blacksmith than watchmaker, which was why it went
6887 *clonk-clank* instead of /tick-tock/. She wore it on her belt and could
6888 tell the time by feeling the stubby little hands.
6890 There was a story in the villages that the clock was Miss Treason's heart,
6891 which she'd used ever since her first heart died. But there were lots of
6892 stories about Miss Treason.
6894 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6898 First Sight and Second Thoughts, that's what a witch had to rely on: First
6899 Sight to see what's really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First
6900 Thoughts to check that they were thinking right. Then there were the
6901 Third Thoughts, which Tiffany had never heard discussed and therefore kept
6902 quiet about; they were odd, seemed to think for themselves, and didn't
6903 turn up very often. And they were telling her that there was more to Miss
6904 Treason than met the eye.
6906 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6908 # pp. 53-54 (in Carpe Jugulum, most of the lore [for humans] about how to kill
6909 # vampires had been written by long-lived/long-not-defunct vampires
6910 # [meaning that it was deliberately full of inaccuracies...])
6912 It was in fact Miss Tick who had written /Witch Hunting for Dumb People/,
6913 and she made sure that copies of it found their way into those areas where
6914 people still believed that witches should be burned or drowned.
6916 Since the only witch ever likely to pass through these days was Miss Tick
6917 herself, it meant that if things did go wrong, she'd get a good night's
6918 sleep and a decent meal before being thrown into the water. The water was
6919 no problem at all for Miss Tick, who had been to the Quirm College for
6920 Young Ladies, where you had to have an icy dip every morning to build Moral
6921 Fiber. And a No. 1 Bosun's knot was very easy to undo with your teeth,
6924 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6928 Working quickly, she emptied her pockets and started a shamble.
6930 Shambles worked. That was about all you could say about them for certain.
6931 You made them out of some string and a couple of sticks and anything you
6932 had in your pocket at the time. They were a witch's equivalent of those
6933 knives with fifteen blades and three screwdrivers and a tiny magnifying
6934 glass and a thing for extracting earwax from chickens.
6936 You couldn't even say precisely what they did, although Miss Tick thought
6937 that they were a way of finding out what things the hidden bits of your
6938 own mind already knew. You had to make a shamble from scratch every time,
6939 and only from things in your pockets. There was no harm in having
6940 interesting things in your pockets, though, just in case.
6942 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6946 A witch didn't do things because they seemed like a good idea at the time!
6947 That was practically cackling! You had to deal every day with people who
6948 were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you
6949 could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably
6950 improved if you gave them a slap. But you didn't because, as Miss Tick
6951 had once explained: a) it would make the world a better place for only a
6952 very short period of time; b) it would then make the world a slightly
6953 worse place; and c) you're not supposed to be as stupid as they are.
6955 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6957 # p. 106 (Rob Anybody is married to their kelda, ruler of the clan;
6958 # passage continues with three or so pages about Explaining
6959 # [focusing on the reactions of the recipient of the explanation:
6960 # Pursin' o' the Lips; Foldin' o' the Arms; Tappin' o' the Feets;
6961 # and also the reactions of the listening Feegles as they hear
6962 # about them] but would end up on the long side if included here)
6964 "Aye, but the boy willna be interested in marryin'," said Slightly Mad
6967 "He might be one day," said Billy Bigchin, who'd made a hobby of watching
6968 humans. "Most bigjob men get married."
6970 "They do?" said a Feegle in astonishment.
6974 "They want tae get married?"
6976 "A lot o' them do, aye," said Billy.
6978 "So there's nae more drinkin', and stealin', and fightin'?"
6980 "Hey, ah'm still allowed some drinkin' and stealin' and fightin'!" said
6983 "Aye, Rob, but we canna help noticin' ye also have tae do the Explainin',
6984 too." said Daft Wullie.
6986 There was a general nodding from the crowd. To Feegles, Explaining was a
6987 dark art. It was just so /hard/.
6989 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
6991 # pp. 126-127 (passage starts mid-paragraph;
6992 # witches know in advance when they're going to die)
6994 "[...] We shall hold the funeral tomorrow afternoon."
6996 "Sorry? You mean /before/ you die?" said Tiffany.
6998 "Why, of course! I don't see why I shouldn't have some fun!"
7000 "Good thinkin'!" said Rob Anybody. "That's the kind o' sensible detail
7001 people usually fails tae consider."
7003 "We call it a going-away party," said Miss Treason. "Just for witches, of
7004 course. Other people tend to get a bit nervous--I can't think why. And
7005 on the bright side, we've got that splendid ham that Mr. Armbinder gave us
7006 last week for settling the ownership of the chestnut tree, and I'd love to
7009 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7013 Some people think that "coven" is a word for a group of witches, and it's
7014 true that's what the dictionary says. But the real word for a group of
7015 witches is an "argument."
7017 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7019 # pp. 174-175 (passage starts mid-paragraph; last paragraph continues, but
7020 # changes topic so abruptly Tiffany gasps; 'rumbustious' is accurate)
7022 "[...] And now I shall tell you something vitally important. It is the
7023 secret of my long life."
7025 Ah, thought Tiffany, and she leaned forward.
7027 "The important thing," said Miss Treason, "is to stay the passage of the
7028 wind. You should avoid rumbustious fruits and vegetables. Beans are the
7029 worst, take it from me."
7031 "I don't think I understand--" Tiffany began.
7033 "Try not to fart, in a nutshell."
7035 "In a nutshell, I imagine it would be pretty unpleasant!" said Tiffany
7036 nervously. She couldn't believe she was being told this.
7038 "This is no joking matter," said Miss Treason. "The human body has only
7039 so much air in it. You have to make it last. One plate of beans can take
7040 a year off your life. I have avoided rumbustiousness all my days. I am
7041 an old person and that means what I say is wisdom!" She gave the
7042 bewildered Tiffany a stern look. "Do you understand, child?"
7044 Tiffany's mind raced. Everything is a test! "No," she said. "I'm not a
7045 child and that's nonsense, not wisdom!"
7047 The stern look cracked into a smile. "Yes," said Miss Treason. "Total
7048 gibberish. But you've got to admit it's a corker, all the same, right?
7049 You definitely believed it, just for a moment? The villagers did last
7050 year. You should have seen the way they walked about for a few weeks!
7051 The strained looks on their faces quite cheered me up! [...]"
7053 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7055 # p. 185 (Miss Treason tells people she's 113, but she's actually /only/ 111)
7057 MISS EUMENIDES TREASON, AGED ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN?
7059 Tiffany heard the voice inside her head. It didn't seem to have come
7060 through her ears. And she'd heard it before, making her quite unusual.
7061 Most people hear the voice of Death only once.
7063 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7067 Tiffany had looked up "strumpet" in the Unexpurgated Dictionary, and found
7068 it meant "a woman who is no better than she should be" and "a lady of easy
7069 virtue." This, she decided after some working out, meant that Mrs. Gytha
7070 Ogg, known as Nanny, was a very respectable person. She found virtue easy,
7071 for one thing. And if she was no better than she should be, she was just
7072 as good as she ought to be.
7074 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7076 # pp. 360-361 ('wurds' is accurate)
7078 "An heroic effect, Mr. Anybody," said Granny. "The first thing a hero must
7079 conquer is his fear, and when it comes to fightin', the Nac Mac Feegle
7080 don't know the meanin' of the word."
7082 "Aye, true enough," Rob grunted. "We dinna ken the meanin' o' thousands
7085 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7087 # pp. 398-399 ("Chumsfanleigh" is pronounced "Chuffley")
7089 At the back of the Feegles' chalk pit, more chalk had been carved out of
7090 the wall to make a tunnel about five feet high and perhaps as long.
7092 In front of it stood Roland de Chumsfanleigh (it wasn't his fault). His
7093 ancestors had been knights, and they had come to own the Chalk by killing
7094 the kings who thought they did. Swords, that's what it had all been about.
7095 Swords and cutting off heads. That was how you got land in the old days,
7096 and then the rules were changed so that you didn't need a sword to own
7097 land anymore, you just needed the right piece of paper. But his ancestors
7098 had still hung on to their swords, just in case people thought that the
7099 whole thing with the bits of paper had been unfair, it being a fact that
7100 you can't please everybody.
7102 He'd always wanted to be good with a sword, and it had come as a shock to
7103 find that they were so /heavy/. He was great at air sword. In front of a
7104 mirror he could fence against his reflection and win nearly all the time.
7105 Real swords didn't allow that. You tried to swing them and they ended up
7106 swinging you. He'd realized that maybe he was more cut out for bits of
7107 paper. Besides, he needed glasses, which could be a bit tricky under a
7108 helmet, especially if someone was hitting /you/ with a sword.
7110 [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
7116 %title Making Money (17)
7117 # p. 187 (Harper edition -- what's become of Harper Torch?)
7119 "I'm an Igor, thur. We don't athk quethtionth."
7123 "I don't know, thur. I didn't athk."
7125 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7127 # p. 177 (originally transcribed from some other edition; Harper edition
7128 # uses American spelling for "armor")
7129 # [some off-duty Watchmen moonlight as bank security guards]
7131 The Watch armor he'd lifted from the bank's locker room fitted like a
7132 glove. He'd have preferred it to fit like a helmet and breastplate.
7133 But, in truth, it probably didn't look any better on its owner, currently
7134 swanking along the corridors in the bank's own shiny but impractical armor.
7135 It was common knowledge that the Watch's approach to uniforms was one-size-
7136 doesn't-exactly-fit-anybody, and that Commander Vimes disapproved of armor
7137 that didn't have that kicked-by-trolls look. He liked armor to state
7138 clearly that it had been doing its job.
7140 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7142 # pp. 108 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
7144 "[...] The world is full of things worth more than gold. But we dig the
7145 damn stuff up and then bury it in a different hole. Where's the sense in
7146 that? What are we, magpies? Good heavens, /potatoes/ are worth more than
7151 "If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag
7152 of potatoes or a bag of gold?"
7154 "Yes, but a desert island isn't Ankh-Morpork!"
7156 "And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right?
7157 It's just a dream. But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. Add
7158 a knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you've got a meal, /anywhere/.
7159 Bury gold in the ground and you'll be worrying about thieves forever.
7160 Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a
7163 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7165 # pp. 22-24 (Albert Spangler is one of Moist Lipwig's aliases;
7166 # 'dyslectic' is accurate)
7168 "Let us talk about angels," said Lord Vetinari.
7170 "Oh yes, I know that one," said Moist bitterly. "I've heard that one.
7171 That's the one you got me with after I was hanged--"
7173 Vetinari raised an eyebrow. "Only mostly hanged, I think you'll find. To
7174 within an inch of your life."
7176 "Whatever! I was hanged! And the worst part of that was finding out I
7177 only got two paragraphs in the /Tanty Bugle/!(1) Two paragraphs, may I
7178 say, for a life of ingenious, inventive, and strictly nonviolent crime?
7179 I could have been an example to the youngsters! Page one got hogged by
7180 the Dyslectic Alphabet Killer, and he only maanaged A and W!"
7182 "I confess the editor does appear to believe that it is not a proper crime
7183 unless someone is found in three alleys at once, but that is the price of
7184 a free press. And it suits us both, does it not, that Albert Spangler's
7185 passage from this world was... unmemorable?"
7187 "Yes, but I wasn't expecting an afterlife like this! I have to do what
7188 I'm told for the rest of my life?"
7190 "Correction, your new life. That is a crude summary, yes," said Vetinari.
7191 "Let me rephrase things, however. Ahead of you, Mr. Lipwig, is a life of
7192 respectable quiet contentment, of civic dignity, and, of course, in the
7193 fullness of time, a pension. Not to mention, of course, the proud gold-ish
7196 Moist winced at this. "And if I /don't/ do what you say?"
7198 "Hmm? Oh, you misunderstand me, Mr. Lipwig. That is what will happen to
7199 you if you decline my offer. If you accept it, you will survive on your
7200 wits against powerful and dangerous enemies, with every day presenting
7201 fresh challanges. Someone may even try to kill you."
7205 "You annoy people. A hat goes with the job, incidentally."
7207 (1) A periodical published throughout the Plains, noted for its coverage
7208 of murder (preferably 'orrible) trials, prison escapes, and the world that
7209 in general is surrounded by a chalk outline. Very popular.
7211 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7215 When he got back to the Post Office, Moist looked up the Lavish family in
7216 /Whom's Whom/. They were indeed what was known of as "old money," which
7217 meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had
7218 originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny,
7219 that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a
7220 slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to
7221 boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and
7222 /rogue/ was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
7224 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7226 # p. 72 ('clacks' is a communication system, here analogous to a telegraph)
7228 He spotted the flimsy pink clacks among the other stuff and tugged it out
7235 SUCCESS. RETURNING DAY AFTER TOMMOROW.
7236 ALL WILL BE REVEALED. S.
7238 Moist put it down carefully.
7240 Obviously she'd missed him terribly and was desperate to see him again, but
7241 she was stingy about spending Golem Trust money. Also, she'd probably run
7244 Moist drummed his fingers on the desk. A year ago he'd asked Adora Belle
7245 Dearheart to be his wife, and she'd explained that, in fact, he was going
7248 It was going to be... well, it was going to be sometime in the near future,
7249 when Mrs. Dearheart finally lost patience with her daughter's busy schedule
7250 and arranged the wedding herself.
7252 But he was a nearly married man, however you looked at it. And nearly
7253 married men didn't get mixed up with the Lavish family. A nearly married
7254 man was steadfast and dependable and always ready to hand his nearly wife
7255 an ashtray. He had to be there for his oneday children, and make sure
7256 they slept in a well-ventilated nursery.
7258 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7260 # p. 79 (passage starts mid-paragraph; departed Mrs. Lavish is a bank owner)
7262 "[...] Now what, Mr. Death?"
7264 NOW? said Death. NOW, YOU COULD SAY, COMES... THE AUDIT.
7266 "Oh. There is one, is there? Well, I'm not ashamed."
7270 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7272 # pp. 183-184 (American spelling of 'gray' is accurate)
7274 Moist lit the lamp and walked over to the battered wreckage of his wardrobe.
7275 Once again he selected the tatty gray suit. It had sentimental value; he
7276 had been hanged in it. And it was an unmemorable suit for an unmemorable
7277 man, with the additional advantage, unlike black, of not showing up in the
7280 (1) Every assassin knew that real black often stood out in the dark,
7281 because the night in the city is usually never full black, and that gray
7282 or green merge much better. But they wore black anyway, because style
7283 trumps utility every time.
7285 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7287 # p. 218 (the Cabinet of Curiosity)
7289 "All right, then," said Moist, "/what does it do/?"
7297 "Where did it come from?"
7301 "Well, that seems to be all," said Moist sarcastically. "Oh no, one last
7302 one: what is it? And let me tell you, I'm agog."
7304 "That may be the wrong sort of question to ask," said Ponder, shaking his
7305 head. "Technically it appears to be a classic Bag of Holding but with /n/
7306 mouths, where /n/ is the number of items in an eleven-dimensional universe,
7307 which are not currently alive, not pink, and can fit in a cubical drawer
7308 14.14 inches on a side, divided by P."
7312 "That may be the wrong sort of question."
7314 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7316 # p. 225 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
7318 "[...] I'll talk to Dr. Hicks. He's the head of the Department of
7319 Postmortem Communications."
7321 "Postmortem Com..." Moist began. "Isn't that the same as necroman--"
7323 "I said the /Department of Postmortem Communications/," said Ponder very
7326 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7328 # p. 247 (it's a spirit summoned by Dr. Hicks that is describing the art/risk)
7330 "Necromancy is a fine art?" said Moist.
7332 "None finer, young man. Get things just a tiny bit wrong and the spirits
7333 of the vengeful dead may enter your head via your ears and blow your brains
7334 out down your nose."
7336 The eyes of Moist and Adora Belle focused on Dr. Hicks like those of an
7337 archer on his target. He waved his hands frantically and mouthed, "Not
7340 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7344 "If you can't stand the heat, get off the pot, that's what I always say,"
7345 said a senior clerk, and there was a general murmur of agreement.
7347 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7349 # p. 264 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
7351 [...] if the fundamental occult maxim "as above, so below" was true, then
7352 so was "as below, so above"...
7354 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7358 "In the Old Country we have a thaying," Igor volunteered.
7362 "A thaying. We thay, 'if you don't want the monthter you don't pull the
7365 "You don't think I've gone mad, do you, Igor?"
7367 "Many great men have been conthidered mad, Mr. Hubert. Even Dr. Hanth
7368 Forvord wath called mad. But I put it to you: could a madman have created
7369 a revolutionary living-brain extractor?"
7371 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7375 There was a saying: "Old necromancers never die." When he told them this,
7376 people would say "... and?" and Hicks would have to reply, "That's all of
7377 it, I'm afraid. Just 'Old necromancers never die.'"
7379 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7381 # p. 336 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
7383 [...] What the iron maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to
7384 Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,(1) far less messy,
7385 considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to /force/ people
7386 to climb inside the iron maiden.
7388 (1) The only real expense was tea and biscuits halfway through, which
7389 seldom happened with the iron maiden.
7391 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7393 # p. 361 (Mr. Slant is a zombie)
7395 "Mrs. Lavish, a lady many of us were privileged to know, recently confided
7396 in me that she was dying," said Vetinari. "She asked me for advice on the
7397 future of the bank, given that her obvious heirs were, in her words, 'as
7398 nasty a bunch of weasels as you could ever hope not to meet--'"
7400 All thirty-one of the Lavish lawyers stood up and spoke at once, incuring
7401 a total cost to clients of $AM119.28p.
7403 Mr. Slant glared at them.
7405 Mr. Slant did not, despite what had been said, have the respect of Ankh-
7406 Morpork's legal profession. He commanded its fear. Death had not
7407 diminished his encyclopedic memory, his guile, his talent for corkscrew
7408 reasoning, and the vitriol of his stare. Do not cross me this day, it
7409 advised the lawyers. Do not cross me, for if you do I will have the flesh
7410 from your very bones and the marrow therein. You know those leather-bound
7411 tomes you have on the wall behind your desks to impress your clients? I
7412 have read them all, and wrote half of them. Do not try me. I am not in a
7415 One by one, they sat down.(1)
7417 (1) Total cost, including time and disbursements: $AM253.16p.
7419 [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
7425 %title Unseen Academicals (12)
7426 # p. 68 (Harper edition)
7428 Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for,
7429 and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it,
7430 but even sitting down, you had to stand out.
7432 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7434 # p. 1 (footnote, so "(1)" ought to be "(2)", but somebody would complain...)
7436 Technically, the city of Ankh-Morpork is a Tyranny, which is not always
7437 the same thing as a monarchy, and in fact even the post of Tyrant has been
7438 somewhat redefined by the incumbent, Lord Vetinari, as the only form of
7439 democracy that works. Everyone is entitled to vote, unless disqualified
7440 by reason of age or not being Lord Vetinari.
7442 And yet it does work. This has annoyed a number of people who feel,
7443 somehow, that it should not work, and who want a monarch instead, thus
7444 replacing a man who has achieved his position by cunning, a deep
7445 understanding of the realities of the human psyche, breathtaking
7446 diplomancy, a certain prowess with the stiletto dagger, and, all agree,
7447 a mind like a finely balanced circular saw, with a man who has got there
7450 However, the crown has hung on anyway, as crowns do--on the Post Office
7451 and the Royal Bank and the Mint and, not least, in the sprawling,
7452 brawling, squalling consciousness of the city itself. Lots of things
7453 live in that darkness. There are all kinds of darkness, and all kinds
7454 of things can be found in them, imprisoned, banished, lost or hidden.
7455 Sometimes they escape. Sometimes they simply fall out. Sometimes they
7456 just can't take it any more.
7458 (1) A third proposition, that the city be governed by a choice of
7459 respectable members of the community who would promise not to give
7460 themselves airs or betray the public trust at every turn, was instantly
7461 the subject of music hall jokes all over the city.
7463 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7467 A wizard could do what he liked in his own study, and in the old days that
7468 had largely meant smoking anything he fancied and farting hugely without
7469 apologizing. These days it meant building out into a congruent set of
7470 dimensions. Even the Archchancellor was doing it, which made it hard for
7471 Ponder to protest: he had half a mile of trout stream in his bathroom,
7472 and claimed that messin' about in his study was what kept a wizard out
7473 of mischief. And, as everyone knew, it did. It generally got him into
7476 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7478 # p. 18 (Ridcully is furious at the former Dean, who left UU to become a
7479 # rival [Arch-]Chancellor at Brazeneck University in Pseudopolis)
7481 "Remuneration? Since when did a wizard work for wages? We are pure
7482 academics, Mister Stibbons! We do not care for mere money!"
7484 Unfortunately, Ponder was a clear logical thinker who, in times of mental
7485 confusion, fell back on reason and honesty, which, when dealing with an
7486 angry Archchancellor, were, to use the proper academic term, unhelpful.
7487 And he neglected to think strategically, always a mistake when talking to
7488 fellow academics, and as a result made the mistake of employing, as at
7489 this point, common sense.
7491 "That's because we never actually pay for anything very much," he said,
7492 "and if anyone needs any petty cash they just help themselves from the
7495 "We are part of the very fabric of the university, Mister Stibbons! We
7496 take only what we require! We do not seek wealth! And most certainly
7497 we do not accept a 'post of vital importance which includes an attractive
7498 package of remuneration,' whatever the hells that means, 'and other
7499 benefits including a generous pension!' A pension, mark you! When has a
7500 wizard ever retired?"
7502 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7504 # p. 19 (She: plump Glenda; Her: fashion-model-to-be Juliet)
7506 She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had
7507 clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her.(1)
7509 (1) The Egregious Professor of Grammar and Usage would have corrected
7510 this to "she was not she," which would have caused the Professor of Logic
7511 to spit out his drink.
7513 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7515 # p. 48 (He: Nutt, a key element of the story who doesn't figure in any
7516 # of the other selected passages...)
7518 He'd tried wandering around the other cellars, but there was nothing much
7519 happening at night, and people gave him funny looks. Ladyship did not
7520 rule here. But wizards are a messy lot and nobody tidied up much and
7521 lived to tell the tale, so all sorts of old storerooms and junk-filled
7522 workshops became his for the use of. And there was so much for a lad with
7523 keen night vision to find. He had already seen some luminous spoon ants
7524 carrying a fork, and, to his surprise, the forgotten mazes were home to
7525 that very rare indoorovore, the Uncommon Sock Eater. There were some
7526 things living up in the pipes, too, which periodically murmured "Awk! Awk!"
7527 Who knew what strange monsters made there home here?
7529 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7533 Truth is female, since truth is beauty rather than handsomeness; this,
7534 Ridcully reflected as the Council grumbled in, would certainly explain
7535 the saying that a lie could run around the world before Truth got its,
7536 correction, /her/ boots on, and since she would have to choose which
7537 pair--the idea that any woman in the position to choose would have just
7538 one pair of boots being beyond rational belief. Indeed, as a goddess she
7539 would have lots of shoes, and thus many choices: comfy shoes for home
7540 truths, hobnail boots for unpleasant truths, simple clogs for universal
7541 truths and possibly some kind of slipper for self-evident truth. More
7542 important right now was what kind of truth he was going to have to impart
7543 to his colleagues, and he decided not on the whole truth, but instead on
7544 nothing but the truth, which dispensed with the need for honesty.
7546 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7548 # p. 166 (see "the wrong sort of question" passage from /Making Money/
7549 # for a description of the Cabinet; items removed from it have to
7550 # be returned within 14:14 hours or they're drawn back magically;
7551 # student in question had removed a sandwich and then eaten it)
7553 "Yes, sir?" said Ponder wearily.
7555 "Promote him. Whatever level he is, move him up one."
7557 "I think that'll send the wrong kind of signal," Ponder tried.
7559 "On the contrary, Mister Stibbons. It will send exactly the right kind of
7560 message to the student body."
7562 "But he disobeyed an express order, may I point out?"
7564 "That's right. He showed independent thinking and a certain amount of
7565 pluck, and in the course of so doing added valuable data to our
7566 understanding of the Cabinet."
7568 "But he might have destroyed the whole university, sir."
7570 "Right, in which case he would have been vigorously disciplined, if we'd
7571 been able to find anything left of him. But he didn't and he was lucky
7572 and we need lucky wizards. Promote him, on the direct order of me, not
7573 pp'd at all. Incidentally, how loud were his screams?"
7575 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7577 # pp. 192-193 ('pants': underpants; 'football': soccer ;-)
7579 "You will arrange yourself into two teams, set up goals, and strive to win!
7580 No man will leave the field of play unless injured! The hands are not to
7581 be used, is that clear? Any questions?" A hand went up. Ridcully sought
7584 "Ah, Rincewind," he said, and, because he was not a determinedly unpleasant
7585 man, amended this to, "Professor Rincewind, of course."
7587 "I would like permission to fetch a note from my mother, sir."
7589 Ridcully sighed. "Rincewind, you once informed me, to my everlasting
7590 puzzlement, that you never knew your mother because she ran away before
7591 you were born. Distinctly remember writing it down in my diary. Would
7592 you like another try?"
7594 "Permission to go and find my mother?"
7596 Ridcully hesitated. The Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography had no
7597 students and no real duties other than to stay out of trouble. Although
7598 Ridcully would never admit it, it was against all reason an emeritus
7599 position. Rincewind was a coward and an unwitting clown, but he had
7600 several times saved the world in slightly puzzling circumstances. He was
7601 a luck sink, the Archchancellor decided, doomed to being a lightning rod
7602 for the fates so that everyone else didn't have to. Such a person was
7603 worth all his meals and laundry (including an above-average level of
7604 soiled pants) and a bucket of coal every day even if he was, in Ridcully's
7605 opinion, a bit of a whiner. However, he was fast, and therefore useful.
7607 "Look," said Rincewind, "a mysterious urn turns up and suddenly it's all
7608 about football. That bodes. It means that something bad is going to
7611 "Come now, it could be something wonderful," Ridcully protested.
7613 Rincewind appeared to give this due consideration. "Could be wonderful,
7614 will be dreadful. Sorry, that's how it goes."
7616 "This is Unseen University, Rincewind. What is there to fear?" Ridcully
7617 said. "Apart from me, of course. Good heavens, this is a sport." He
7618 raised his voice. "Arrange yourselves into two teams and play football!"
7620 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7622 # p. 268 (passage starts mid-paragraph; Glenda is cleaning UU's Night Kitchen)
7624 [...] If you wanted a job done properly, you had to do it yourself.
7625 Juliet's verison of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say
7626 it was erratic, past all understanding and seldom seen.
7628 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7632 "Well, big day, lads!" said Ridcully. "Looks like there's going to be a
7633 nice day for it as well. They're all over there waiting for us to give
7634 them a show. I want you to approach this in the best traditions of Unseen
7635 University sportsmanship, which is to cheat whenever you are unobserved,
7636 though I fear that the chance of anyone being unobserved today is remote.
7637 But in any case, I want you to give it one hundred and ten percent."
7639 "Excuse me, Archchancellor," said Ponder Stibbons. "I understand the
7640 sense of what you are saying, but there is only one hundred percent."
7642 "Well, they could give it one hundred and ten percent if they tried
7643 harder," said Ridcully.
7645 "Well, yes and no, sir. But, in fact, that would mean that you had just
7646 made the one hundred percent bigger while it would still be one hundred
7647 percent. Besides, there is only so fast a man can run, only so high a man
7648 can jump. I just wanted to make the point."
7650 "Good point, well made," said Ridcully, dismissing it instantly. [...]
7652 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7654 # p. 363 (more lyrics occur later on; they're generally about using
7655 # economics to conquer any opposition)
7657 The singing of the National Anthem was always a ragged affair, the good
7658 people of Ankh-Morpork feeling that it was unpatriotic to sing songs about
7659 how patriotic you were, taking the view that someone singing a song about
7660 how patriotic they were was either up to something or a Head of State.(1)
7662 An additional problem today lay in the acoustics of the arena, which were
7663 rather too good, coupled with the fact that the speed of sound at one end
7664 of the stadium was slightly offbeat compared with the other end, a
7665 drawback exacerbated when both sides tried to recover the gap.
7667 These acoustical anomalies did not count for much if you were standing
7668 next to Mustrum Ridcully, as the Archchancellor was one of those gentleman
7669 who will sing it beautifully, correctly enunciated and very, very loudly.
7671 "'When dragons belch and hippos flee, my thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of
7674 (1) i.e., up to something.
7676 [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
7682 %title I Shall Wear Midnight (13)
7683 # p. 447 (Harper edition; this passage is a quote from the "Authur's Note",
7684 # three extra pages after the conclusion of the story; there is a
7685 # similar, slightly shorter version of this in the text on p. 236,
7686 # where it's preceded by "The past needs to be remembered." but
7687 # lacks the final 'going wrong' sentence)
7689 It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not
7690 know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you
7691 don't know where you are, you don't know where you're going. And if you
7692 don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.
7694 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7696 # pp. 429-430 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
7698 "[...] There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could
7699 change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that
7700 when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having. [...]"
7702 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7704 # p. 2 (passage starts mid-paragraph; scene is a village fair)
7706 [...] And so here, [...], you heard the permanent scream of, well,
7707 everyone. It was called having fun. The only people not making any noise
7708 were the thieves and pickpockets, who went about their business with
7709 commendable silence, and they didn't come near Tiffany; who would pick a
7710 witch's pocket? You would be lucky to get all your fingers back. At
7711 least, that's what they feared, and a sensible witch would encourage them
7714 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7718 /The hare runs into the fire./
7720 Had she seen that written down anywhere? Had she heard it as part of a
7721 song? A nursery rhyme? What had the hare got to do with anything? But
7722 she was a witch, after all, and there was a job to do. Mysterious omens
7723 could wait. Witches knew that mysterious omens were around all the time.
7724 The world was always very nearly drowning in mysterious omens. You just
7725 had to pick the one that was convenient.
7727 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7731 That was the thing about thoughts. They thought themselves, and then
7732 dropped into your head in the hope that you would think so too. You had
7733 to slap them down, thoughts like that; they would take a witch over if she
7734 let them. And then it would all break down, and nothing would be left but
7737 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7739 # p. 65 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
7741 "[...] It just so happens that I was passing by, ye ken, and not
7742 following ye at all. One of them coincidences."
7744 "There have been a lot of those coincidences lately," said Tiffany.
7746 "Aye," said Rob, grinning, "it must be another coincidence."
7748 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7752 Tiffany cleared her throat. "Well," she said, "I suppose Rob Anybody would
7753 tell you that there are times when promises should be kept and times when
7754 promises should be broken, and it takes a Feegle to know the difference."
7756 Mrs. Proust grinned hugely. "You could almost be from the city, Miss
7759 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7761 # p. 183 (Wee Mad Arthur is a member of the Ankh-Morpork Watch; he was a
7762 # foundling raised by gnomes and didn't know he was a Feegle until
7763 # he met with the ones accompanying Tiffany)
7765 Despite himself, Wee Mad Arthur was grinning. "Have you boys got no shame?"
7767 Rob Anybody matched him grin for grin. "I couldna say," he replied, "but
7768 if we have, it probably belonged tae somebody else."
7770 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7774 There is a lot of folklore about equestrian statues, especially the ones
7775 with riders on them. There is said to be a code in the number and
7776 placement of the horse's hooves: If one of the horse's hooves is in the
7777 air, the rider was wounded in battle; two legs in the air means that the
7778 rider was killed in battle; three legs in the air indicates that the
7779 rider got lost on the way to the battle; and four legs in the air means
7780 that the sculptor was very, very clever. Five legs in the air means that
7781 there's probably at least one other horse standing behind the one you're
7782 looking at; and the rider lying on the ground with his horse lying on top
7783 of him with all four legs in the air means that the rider was either a
7784 very incompetent horseman or owned a very bad-tempered horse.
7786 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7788 # p. 318 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
7790 [...] "Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter is
7791 mass, and mass changes time and space." [...]
7793 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7795 # p. 362 (passage starts mid-paragraph; speaker is Preston, a castle guard;
7796 # quote is a parody of J.R.R.Tolkien's "Do not meddle in the affairs
7797 # of wizards, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.")
7799 [...] "My granny said, 'Don't meddle in the affairs of witches because
7800 they clout you around the ear.'"
7802 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7804 # pp. 386-387 (Tiffany is trying to rescue some witches from a castle roof)
7806 Tiffany crawled a little farther, well aware of the sheer drop an inch
7807 away from her hand. "Preston has gone to fetch a rope. Do you have a
7810 "A sheep crashed into it," said Mrs. Proust.
7812 Tiffany could just make her out now. "You crashed into a sheep in
7815 "Maybe it was a cow, or something. What are those things that go
7818 "You ran into a flying hedgehog?"
7820 "No, as it happened. We were down low, looking for a bush for Mrs.
7821 Happenstance." There was a sigh in the gloom. "It's because of her
7822 trouble, poor soul. We've stopped at a lot of bushes on the way here,
7823 believe me! And do you know what? Inside every single one of them is
7824 something that stings, bites, kicks, screams, howls, squelches, farts
7825 enormously, goes all spiky, tries to knock you over, or does an enormous
7826 pile of poo! Haven't you people up here ever heard of porcelain?"
7828 Tiffany was taken aback. "Well, yes, but not in the fields!"
7830 "They would be all the better for it," said Mrs. Proust. "I've ruined
7831 a decent pair of boots, I have."
7833 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7835 # p. 442 (passage starts mid-paragraph; see /The Wee Free Men/;
7836 # 'underrr' and 'ag-rreeeed' are accurate; 'arr-angement' is
7837 # hyphenated to span lines--it's just a guess that it would have
7838 # been hyphenated anyway)
7840 "Nae king, nae quin, nae laird! One baron--and underrr mutually
7841 ag-rreeeed arr-angement, ye ken!"
7843 [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
7850 # p. 168 (Harper edition; 'ax' is spelled without the 'e' there...)
7852 They were crude weapons, to be sure, but a flint axe hitting your head does
7853 not need a degree in physics.
7855 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7858 It is a strange thing to find yourself doing something you have apparently
7859 always wanted to do, when in fact up until that moment you had never known
7860 that you always wanted to do it...
7862 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7864 # p. 2 (the subject is goblins)
7866 At this point, Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, stopped reading
7867 and stared at nothing. After a few seconds, nothing was eclipsed by the
7868 form of Drumknott, his secretary (who, it must be said, had spent a career
7869 turning himself as much like nothing as anything).
7871 Drumknott said, "You look pensive, my lord," to which observation he
7872 appended a most delicate question mark, which gradually evaporated.
7874 "Awash with tears, Drumknott, awash with tears."
7876 Drumknott stopped dusting the impeccably shiny black lacquered desk.
7877 "Pastor Oats is a very persuasive writer, isn't he, sir...?"
7879 "Indeed he is, Drumknott, but the basic problem remains and it is this:
7880 humanity may come to terms with the dwarf, the troll and even the orc,
7881 terrifying though all these have proved to be at times, and you know why
7882 this is, Drumknott?"
7884 The secretary carefully folded the duster he had been using and looked at
7885 the ceiling. "I would venture to suggest, my lord, that in their violence
7886 we recognize ourselves?"
7888 "Oh, well done, Drumknott, I shall make a cynic of you yet! Predators
7889 respect other predators, do they not? They may perhaps even respect the
7890 prey: the lion may lie down with the lamb, even if only the lion is
7891 likely to get up again, but the lion will not lie down with the rat.
7892 Vermin, Drumknott, an entire race reduced to vermin!"
7894 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7898 Vimes grunted. "Where there are policemen there's crime, sergeant,
7901 "Yes, I do, sir, although I think it sounds better with a little reordering
7904 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7906 # pp. 46-47 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph; it's a
7907 # long slog for a weak punchline...)
7909 "[...] The third earl, 'Mad' Jack Ramkin, had a brother called
7910 Woolsthorpe, probably for his sins. He was something of a scholar and
7911 would have been sent to the university to become a wizard were it not for
7912 the fact that his brother let it be known that any male sibling of his who
7913 took up a profession that involved wearing a dress would be disinherited
7916 "Nevertheless, young Woolsthorpe persevered in his studies in natural
7917 philosophy in the way a gentleman should, by digging into any suspicious-
7918 looking burial mounds he could find in the neighborhood, filling up his
7919 lizard press with as many rare species as he could collect, and drying
7920 samples of any flowers he could find before they became extinct. The
7921 story runs that, on one warm summer day, he dozed off under an apple tree
7922 and was awakened when an apple fell on his head. A lesser man, as his
7923 biographer put it, would have seen nothing untoward about this, but
7924 Woolsthorpe surmised that, since apples and practically everything else
7925 always fell down, then the world would eventually become dangerously
7926 unbalanced... unless there was another agency involved that natural
7927 philosophy had yet to discover. He lost no time in dragging one of the
7928 footmen to the orchard and ordering him, on the pain of dismissal, to lie
7929 under the tree until an apple hit him on the head! The possibility of
7930 this happening was increased by another footman who had been told by
7931 Woolsthorpe to shake the tree vigorously until the required apple fell.
7932 Woolsthorpe was ready to observe this from a distance.
7934 "Who can imagine his joy when the inevitable apple fell and a second apple
7935 was seen rising from the tree and disappearing at speed into the vaults of
7936 heaven, proving the hypothesis that what goes up must come down, provided
7937 that what goes down must come up, thus safeguarding the equilibrium of the
7938 Universe. Regrettably, this only works with apples and, amazingly, only
7939 the apples on this one tree, /Malus equilibria/! I hear that someone has
7940 worked out that the apples at the top of the tree fill with gas and fly up
7941 when the tree is disturbed so that it can set its seeds some way off.
7942 Wonderful thing, nature, shame the fruit tastes like dog's business,"
7943 Willikins added as Young Sam spat some out. [...]
7945 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7949 "Look, Willikins, I don't like to involve you in all this. It's only a
7952 Willikins waved this away. "You wouldn't keep me out of it for a big
7953 clock, sir, because all this is tickling my fancy as well. I shall lay
7954 out a selection of cutting edges for you in your dressing room, sir, and I
7955 myself will go up to the copse half an hour before you're due to be there,
7956 with my trusty bow and an assortment of favorite playthings. It's nearly
7957 full moon, clear skies, there'll be shadows everywhere, and I'll be
7958 standing in the darkest one of them."
7960 Vimes looked at him for a moment and said, "Could I please amend that
7961 suggestion? Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour
7962 before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?"
7964 "Ah yes, that's why you command the watch, sir," said Willikins, and to
7965 Vimes's shock there was a hint of a tear in the man's voice. "You're
7966 listening to the street, aren't you, sir, yes?"
7968 Vimes shrugged. "No streets here, Willikins."
7970 Willikins shook his head. "Once a street boy, always a street boy, sir.
7971 It comes with us, in the pinch. Mothers go, fathers go--if we ever knew
7972 who they were--but the Street, well, the Street looks after us. In the
7973 pinch it keeps us alive."
7975 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7977 # p. 116 (passage ends mid-paragraph)
7979 Well, we live and learn, Vimes thought, or perhaps more importantly, we
7980 learn and live. [...]
7982 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7986 In the country, there is always somebody watching you, he thought as they
7987 sped along. Well, there was always somebody watching you in the city, too,
7988 but that was generally in the hope that you might drop dead and they could
7989 run off with your wallet. They were never /interested/. But here he
7990 thought he could feel many eyes on him. Maybe they belonged to squirrels
7991 or badgers, or whatever the damn things were that Vimes heard at night;
7994 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
7998 "Well, sir, it looks as though they're pleased to see us, yes?"
8000 Feeney's relief and hope should have been bottled and sold to despairing
8001 people everywhere. Vimes just nodded, because the ranks were pulling
8002 apart, leaving a pathway of sorts, at the end of which there was,
8003 inarguably, a corpse. It was a mild relief to see that it was a goblin
8004 corpse, but no corpse is good news, particularly when seen in a grimy low
8005 light and especially for the corpse. And yet something inside him exulted
8006 and cried /Hallelujah!/, because here was a corpse and he was a copper
8007 and this was a crime and this place was smoky and dirty and full of
8008 suspicious-looking goblins and here was a /crime/. His world. Yes, here
8011 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8015 Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of gradually
8016 being eaten by the pillows, and said to Sybil, "Do the Rust family have a
8019 Too late he reflected that this might be a bad move because she might well
8020 have told him all about it on one of those occasions when, so unusally for
8021 a married man, he was not paying much attention to what his wife was
8022 saying, and therefore he might be the cause of grumpiness in those
8023 precious, warm minutes before sleep. All he could see of her right now
8024 was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her, but she mumbled,
8025 drowsily, "Oh, they bought Hangnail Manor ten years or so ago, after the
8026 Marquis of Fantailer murdered his wife with a pruning knife in the
8027 pineapple house. Don't you remember? You spent weeks searching the city
8028 for him. In the end everybody seemed to think he'd gone off to Fourecks
8029 and disguised himself by not calling himself the Marquis of Fantailer."
8031 "Oh yes," said Vimes, "and I remember that a lot of his chums were quite
8032 indignant about the investigation! They said he'd only done one murder,
8033 and it was his wife's fault for having the bad taste to die after just one
8036 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8038 # p. 212 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
8040 [...] he had heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns
8041 drinking champagne.(1) [...]
8043 (1) This is, of course, absolutely true.
8045 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8047 # p. 217 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
8049 "[...] and the Summoning Dark is /real/. It's not all in your head,
8050 commander: no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too. Oh dear,
8051 you of all people must recognize a substition when you're possessed by it?
8052 It's the opposite of superstition: it's real even if you don't believe
8055 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8059 Vimes frowned. He couldn't remember ever going into a church or a temple
8060 or one of the numerous other places of more or less spirituality for any
8061 other reason than the occasional requirements of the job. These days he
8062 tended to go in for reasons of Sybil, i.e., his wife dragging him along
8063 so that he could be seen, and, if possible, seen remaining awake.
8065 No, the world of next worlds, afterlives, and purgatorial destinations
8066 simply did not fit into his head. Whether you wanted it or not, you were
8067 born, you did the best you could, and then, whether you really wanted to
8068 or not, you died. They were the only certainties, and so the best thing
8069 for a copper to do was to get on with the job. And it was about time
8070 that Sam Vimes got back to doing his.
8072 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8074 # p. 254 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
8076 [...] And maybe if I distinguish myself I can get a job in the city, so
8077 that my mum can live in a place where you don't lie awake at night
8078 listening to the mice fighting the cockroaches--hooray!(1)
8080 (1) Regrettably, Constable Upshot was overly hopeful: in Ankh-Morpork the
8081 mice and cockroaches had decided to forget their differences and gang up
8084 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8086 # p. 403 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
8088 "[...] And I remember reading somewhere that you would arrest the gods
8089 for doing it wrong."
8091 Vimes shook his head. "I'm sure I never said anything of the sort! But
8092 law is order and order is law and it must be the highest thing. The world
8093 runs on it, the heavens run on it and without order, lad, one second
8094 cannot follow another."
8096 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8100 The sound of the gentle rattle of china cup on china saucer drives away
8101 all demons, a little-known fact.
8103 [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
8109 %title Raising Steam (13)
8110 # p. 281 (Anchor Books edition; passage starts mid-paragraph)
8112 [...] And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don't
8113 know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing.
8114 It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.
8116 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8118 # p. 358 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph; quote is
8119 # attributed to Lord Vetinari but he's not present in the scene)
8121 "If you take enough precautions, you never need to take precautions."
8123 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8125 # p. 57 (Anchor Books edition)
8127 Rhys Rhysson, Low King of the dwarfs, was a dwarf of keen intelligence,
8128 but he sometimes wondered why someone with that intelligence would go into
8129 dwarfish politics, let alone be King of the Dwarfs. Lord Vetinari had it
8130 so easy he must hardly know he was born! The King thought that humans
8131 were, well, reasonably sensible, whereas there was an old dwarf proverb
8132 which, translated, said, "Any three dwarfs having a sensible conversation
8133 will always end up having four points of view."
8135 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8139 Curious, the Patrician thought, as Drumknott hurried away to dispatch a
8140 clacks to the editor of the /Times/, that people in Ankh-Morpork professed
8141 not to like change while at the same time fixating on every new
8142 entertainment and diversion that came their way. There was nothing the
8143 mob liked better than novelty. Lord Vetinari sighed again. Did they
8144 actually think? These days /everybody/ used the clacks, even little old
8145 ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about all
8146 these newfangled ideas, totally missing the irony. And in this doleful
8147 mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were
8148 just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when
8149 fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here
8150 to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a
8153 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8155 # p. 175 (third paragraph has a final sentence, but it's about 'grags'
8156 # which wouldn't make any sense here where's no context about them)
8158 "Mister Lipwig, you know what they say about dwarfs?"
8160 Moist looked blank. "Very small people?"
8162 "'Two dwarfs is an argument, three dwarfs is a war,' Mister Lipwig. It's
8163 squabble, squabble, squabble. It's built into their culture. [...]"
8165 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8167 # p. 233 (second paragraph of a footnote)
8169 There clearly has been magic at work in the Netherglades and its future as
8170 the pharmacopoeia of the world is being tested by Professor Rincewind of
8171 Unseen University. A dispatch from him reveals that the juice pressed from
8172 a certain little yellow flower induces certainty in the patient for up to
8173 fifteen minutes. About what they are certain they cannot specify, but the
8174 patient is, in that short time, completely certain about /everything/. And
8175 further research has found that a floating water hyacinth yields in its
8176 juices total /un/certainty about anything for half a hour. Philosophers
8177 are excited about the uses for these potions, and the search continues for
8178 a plant that combines the qualities of both, thereby being of great use to
8181 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8185 The town of Big Cabbage, theoretically the last place any sensible person
8186 would want to visit, was nevertheless popular throughout the summer because
8187 of the attractions of Brassica World and the Cabbage Research Institute,
8188 whose students were the first to get a cabbage to a height of five hundred
8189 yards propelled entirely by its own juices. Nobody asked why they felt it
8190 was necessary to do this, but that was science for you, and, of course,
8193 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8195 # pp. 363-364 ("Of the Wheel the Spoke" is the goblin's formal name; perhaps
8196 # a new name chosen or given after inventing the bicycle?)
8198 A few weeks later, Drumknott persuaded Lord Vetinari to accompany him to
8199 the area behind the palace where a jungle of drain pipes emptied and
8200 several mismatched sheds, washhouses, and lean-tos housed some of the
8201 necessary functions without which a modern palace could not operate.(1)
8203 There was a young goblin waiting there, rather nervous, clasping what
8204 looked like two wheels held together by not very much. The wheels were
8207 Durmknott cleared his throat. "Show his lordship your new invention,
8208 Mister Of the Wheel the Spoke."
8210 (1) Frankly most palaces are just like this. Their backsides do not bear
8213 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8216 # passages 9..13 added after 3.6.0's release
8220 Moist Von Lipwig had done some heavy work once and couldn't see any future
8221 in it, but he could look at it for hours, provided other people were doing
8222 it, of course, and clearly some of them liked what they were doing, and so
8223 he shrugged and felt happy that Crisp was happy being a handyman whilst
8224 Moist was happy not picking up anything that was heavier than a glass.
8225 After all, his work was unseen and depended on words, which were
8226 fortunately not very heavy and didn't need grease. In his career as a
8227 crook they had served him well and now he felt somewhat smug at using them
8228 to the benefit of the citizenry.
8230 There was a difference between a banker and a crook, there really was, and
8231 although it was very, very teeny Moist felt that he should point out that
8232 it did exist and, besides, Lord Vetinari always had his eye on him.
8234 So everybody was happy and Moist went to work in very clean clothes and
8235 with a very clean conscience.
8237 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8241 Harry, red-faced and impatient, looked over his desk and said to him, "Lad,
8242 time is money and I'm a busy man. You told Nancy down on reception that
8243 you've got something I might like. Now stop fidgeting and look me in the
8244 face square like. If you're another chancer wanting to bamboozle me I'll
8245 have you down the Effing stairs(1) before you know it."
8247 (1) The wonderfully colored oak wood of the Effing Forest was much in
8248 demand for high-class joinery.
8250 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8254 Moist knew about the zeitgeist, he tasted it in the wind, and sometimes it
8255 allowed him to play with it. He understood it, and now it hinted at speed,
8256 escape, something wonderfully new, the very bones of the land awakening,
8257 and suddenly it seemed to cry out for motion, new horizons, faraway places,
8258 /anywhere that is not here/! No doubt about it, the railway was going to
8259 turn coal into gold.
8261 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8263 # p. 195 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
8265 And the trouble with madness was that the mad didn't know they were mad.
8267 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8269 # p. 284 (passage starts mid-paragraph; speaker is Cmdr Vimes of the Watch)
8271 "[...] That's the trouble, you see. When you've had hatred on your tongue
8272 for such a long time, you don't know how to spit it out."
8274 [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
8280 %title The Shepherd's Crown (1)
8282 'It's an inconvenience, true enough, and I don't like it at all, but I
8283 know that you do it for everyone, Mister Death. Is there any other way?'
8285 NO, THERE ISN'T, I'M AFRAID. WE ARE ALL FLOATING IN THE WINDS OF TIME.
8286 BUT YOUR CANDLE, MISTRESS WEATHERWAX, WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE
8287 IT GOES OUT -- A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED. FOR I CAN SEE THE
8288 BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND
8289 IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT...
8291 [The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett]
8297 #-----------------------------------------------------
8298 # Used for interaction with Death.
8300 # Death Quotes are always one line, and '%e passage' can be omitted.
8303 %title Death Quotes (31)
8305 WHERE THE FIRST PRIMAL CELL WAS, THERE WAS I ALSO. WHERE MAN IS, THERE AM I. WHEN THE LAST LIFE CRAWLS UNDER FREEZING STARS, THERE WILL I BE.
8307 # Feet of Clay, p. 17 (Harper Torch edition)
8309 I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. /I/ TURN UP ONLY ONCE.
8311 # Men at Arms, p. 27 (Harper Torch edition)
8313 THINK OF IT MORE AS BEING ... DIMENSIONALLY DISADVANTAGED.
8315 # Soul Music, p. 146 (Harper Torch edition; we omit "said Death," after comma)
8317 I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.
8320 # Not a direct quote, but a reference to Thief of Time and the fact that
8322 HAVE YOU SPOKEN TO RONNIE LATELY?
8324 # Raising Steam, p. 180 (Anchor Books edition)
8326 PLEASE DO NOT PANIC. YOU ARE MERELY DEAD.
8328 # Small Gods, p. 90 (Harper Torch edition)
8330 THERE IS A LITTLE CONFUSION AT FIRST. IT IS ONLY TO BE EXPECTED.
8332 # Hogfather, p. 343 (Harper Torch edition; Death "lives" outside of normal
8335 THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR ANOTHER LAST MINUTE.
8336 # Wintersmith, p. 187 (HarperTeen edition; dying Miss Treason takes a ham
8337 # [too silly?] sandwich with her to the grave, and it accompanies
8338 # her to the afterlife, but its condiments don't)
8340 MUSTARD IS ALWAYS TRICKY.
8342 PICKLES OF ALL SORTS DON'T SEEM TO MAKE IT. I'M SORRY.
8343 # The Colour of Magic, p. 68 (Signet edition)
8345 IT WON'T HURT A BIT.
8349 # p. 251 (speaker is actually a demon named 'Scrofula' filling in for Death)
8351 I HAVE COME FOR THEE.
8352 # The Light Fantastic, p. 52 (Signet edition; quote has quotation marks but
8353 # including them here wouldn't fit with the rest;
8354 # Death is addressing an elderly wizard who went
8355 # to extreme measures to hide himself [from Death])
8357 DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT?
8358 # Equal Rites, p. 14 (Signet edition; second sentence continues
8359 # 'said the deep, heavy voice...')
8361 THERE IS NO GOING BACK. THERE IS NO GOING BACK.
8362 # p. 15 (contradicts later descriptions of Death as existing outside of time;
8363 # presumably it's just intended as a colloquial expression)
8365 I HAVEN'T GOT ALL DAY, YOU KNOW.
8368 LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING.
8369 # Mort, p. 148 (Signet edition)
8371 NO-ONE EVER WANTED TO TALK TO ME BEFORE.
8374 I HAVEN'T GOT A SINGLE FRIEND. EVEN CATS FIND ME AMUSING.
8375 # Sourcery, p. 12 (Signet edition)
8377 YOU'RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE.
8378 # Wyrd Sisters, p. 11 (ROC edition)
8380 I SAID WAS. IT'S CALLED THE PAST TENSE. YOU'LL SOON GET USED TO IT.
8383 DON'T LET IT UPSET YOU.
8384 # Pyramids, p. 57 (ROC edition)
8386 I CAN SEE THAT YOU HAVE GOT A LOT TO THINK ABOUT.
8387 # Eric, p. 134 (Harper Torch edition)
8389 PERHAPS IT'S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY.
8390 # Moving Pictures, p. 260 (ROC edition)
8392 I KNOW WHEN EVERYONE'S HAD ENOUGH.
8393 # Reaper Man, p. 10 (ROC edition)
8395 I HAVE ALWAYS DONE MY DUTY AS I SAW FIT.
8398 I AM NOT KNOWN FOR MY SENSE OF FUN.
8401 I MEAN THAT THERE IS A TIME FOR EVERYONE TO DIE.
8404 JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS A METAPHORE DOESN'T MEAN IT CAN'T BE REAL.
8407 I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.
8408 # Witches Abroad, p. 298 (Death's explanation why he didn't come for zombie 12
8409 # years earlier: YOU STOPPED LIVING. YOU NEVER DIED.)
8411 I HAD AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOU TONIGHT.