Sunday, October 29, 2006

Pratchettphernalia

Been Discworlding again. Here are some quotes:
"The Patrician was not a man you shook a finger at unless you wanted to end up being able to count only to nine."
"Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sergeant Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. He got her tea ready before he left at night, she left his breakfast nice and hot in the oven in the mornings. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting."
"The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to."
"Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think."
"You couldn't put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place where the inevitable just went and waited."
"People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time."
"The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote. [Footnote: Provided that he wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous, or a woman.]"
"Dhblah sidled closer. This was not hard. Dhblah sidled everywhere. Crabs thought he walked sideways."
"Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be."
"There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in [the library] now, each one -- according to itself -- the only book any man need ever read."

"...Vimes's grin was as funny as the one that moves very fast towards drowning men. And has a fin on top."

"A key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. "

"Dwarfs are very attached to gold. Any highwayman demanding 'Your money or your life' had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on."

"There is a curse. They say: may you live in interesting times."

"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."

"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."

"Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks round, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves."

"...even ordinary books are dangerous, and not only the ones like Make Gelignite the Professional Way. A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven't even read it are dying because the ones who did haven't got the joke."