Jingo by Terry Pratchett
The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world. This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of squid whatsoever. (J)
The sinking of continents is usually accompanied by volcanoes, earthquakes, and armadas of little boats containing old men anxious to build pyramids and mystic stone circles in some new land where being the possessor of genuine ancient occult wisdom might be expected to attract girls. (J)
As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus. (J)
People live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work every day, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear. (J)
Detritus's intelligence wasn't too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line-dancer, but you could rely on him not to let it slow him down. (J)
... he listened with great care because what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That's where the things were that they hoped he didn't know and didn't want him to find out. (J)
‘Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.’ (J)
‘Well, there’s…’ Colon racked his brains. ‘There’s al-gebra. That’s like sums with letters. For…for people whose brains aren’t clever enough for numbers, see?’ (J)
It wasn’t proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing. (J)
And there was nothing finer than a wizard dressed up formally, until someone could find a way of inflating a Bird of Paradise, possibly by using an elastic band and some kind of gas. (J)
'I hope you are not impugning my men, sir.'
'Vimes, Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs have never been pugn'd in their entire lives.' (J)
'Can't argue with the truth, sir.'
'In my experience, Vimes, you can argue with anything.' (J)
'One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,' said Vetinari, after some thought, 'is that they very seldom explode.' (J)
... you couldn't really imprison someone like Leonard of Quirm. The most you could do was lock up his body. The gods alone knew where his mind went. (J)
No wonder this man was a diplomat. You couldn’t trust him an inch, he thought in loops, and you couldn’t help liking him despite it. (J)
And if the Patrician was anything, he was the political equivalent of the old lady who saves bits of string because you never know when they might come in handy. (J)
After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way. (J)
After all, when you seek advice from someone it's certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself. (J
The unofficial entrance to the University has always been known only to students. What most students failed to remember was that the senior members of the faculty had also been students once, and also liked to get out and about after the official shutting of the gates. This naturally led to a certain amount of embarrassment and diplomacy on dark evenings. (J)
No-one could be so simple, no-one could be so creatively dumb, without being very intelligent. It was like being an actor. Only a very good actor was any good at being a bad actor. (J)
It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus. (J)
‘This belonged to my great-granddad,’ he said. ‘He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole.’
‘Pretty miraculous,’ Carrot agreed.
‘Yeah, it was, I s’pose,’ said the sergeant. He looked ruefully at the battered volume. ‘Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really.’ (J)
One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. (J)
Downstairs, Sybil had cooked him a meal. She wasn’t a very good cook. This was fine by Vimes, because he wasn’t a very good eater. (J)
‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,’ said Carrot.
‘Really? Well, there’s eleven of them.’ (J)
‘D’reg?’ said Angua.
‘A warlike desert tribe,’ said Carrot. ‘Very fierce. Honourable, though. They say that if a D’reg is your friend he’s your friend for the rest of your life.’
‘And if he’s not your friend?’
‘That’s about five seconds.’ (J)
‘You, sir, are no gentleman,’ said Rust.
‘I knew there was something about me that I liked.’ (J)
…he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable then of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? (J)
The Librarian shyly held out a small, battered green book. Vimes had been expecting something bigger, but he took it anyway. It paid to look at any book the orang-utan gave you. He matched you up to books. Vimes supposed it was a knack, in the same way that an undertaker was very good at judging heights. (J)
‘… they say there’s a thin line between genius and madness…’
‘He’s fallen off it, then.’ (J)
... what was so special about 'special qualities'? Limpets had special qualities. (J)
'Tell me, sergeant, are you of a nautical persuasion?'
Colon saluted again. 'Nossir! Happily married man, sir!' (J)
The city of Genua had run out of royalty, inbreeding having progressed to the point where the sole remaining example consisted mostly of teeth ... (J)
‘It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country,’ he read. ‘This means both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.’ (J)
‘You can tell me about appointments I don’t know about?’ said Vimes.
‘They’re still appointments sine qua appointments,’ said the demon. ‘They exist, as it were, in appointment phase space.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Look,’ said the demon patiently, ‘You can have an appointment at any time, right? So therefore any appointment exists in potentia -’
“Where’s that?’
‘Any particular appointment simply collapses the waveform,’ said the demon, ‘I merely select the most likely one from the projected matrix.’ (J)
... history was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started to follow bad orders. (J)
To history, choices are merely directions. (J)
…the Patrician was against printing, because if people knew too much it would only bother them. (J)
No-one likes being told it’s their lucky day. That sort of thing does not bode well. When someone tells you it’s your lucky day, something bad is about to happen. (J)
‘Odd thing, ain’t it…you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.’ (J)
71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no-one else believed. (J)
The sudden appearance of a naked woman always caused a rethink of anyone’s immediate plans. (J)
She was aware that she had a slight advantage over male werewolves in that naked women caused fewer complaints, although the downside was that they got some pressing invitations. Some kind of covering was essential, for modesty and the prevention of inconvenient bouncing, which was why fashioning impromptu clothes out of anything to hand was a lesser-known werewolf skill. (J)
...to a werewolf all humans looked alike: they looked appetizing. (J)
... he was suffering simultaneously from claustrophobia and agoraphobia. He was afraid of everything in here and everything out there at the same time. (J)
‘C’mon, sarge, you know it’s not a proper tattoo unless no-one can remember how it got there.’ (J)
‘Fortune favours the brave, sir,’ said Carrot cheerfully.
‘Good. Good. Pleased to hear it, captain. What is her position vis à vis heavily armed, well prepared and excessively manned armies?’
‘Oh, no-one’s ever heard of Fortune favouring them, sir.’ (J)
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.” (J)
Vimes awoke with a noseful of camel. There are far worse awakenings, but not as many as you might think. (J)
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way. (J)
The night is always old. He’d walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. (J)
Colon had always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them go out and die famously for god, country, and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made. It had never occurred to him that they might do it because they’d get yelled at if they didn’t. (J)
And Sergeant Colon once again knew a secret about bravery. It was arguable a kind of enhanced cowardice – the knowledge that while death may await you if you advance it will be a picnic compared to the certain living hell that awaits should you retreat. (J)
Experience had taught him never to say things like 'I don't like it, it's too quiet.' There was no such thing as too quiet. (J)
Attacking a dangerous enemy who isn't there is one of the more attractive forms of warfare ... (J)
'I love the idea of giving in without a fight. I've fought for ten years and giving in without a fight is what I've always wanted to do.' (J)
'... Carrot takes an interest. He doesn't even think about it. He makes space in his head for people. He takes an interest, and so people think they're interesting. They feel .... better when he's around.' (J)
Animals tended to like Nobby. He didn’t smell wrong. (J)
One of the minor laws of the narrative universe is that any homely featured man who has, for some reason, to disguise himself as a woman will apparently become attractive to some otherwise perfectly sane men with. As the ancient scrolls say, hilarious results. (J)
'Legends are prone to inflation.' (J)
He believed, along with General Tacticus, that courage, bravery and the indomitable human spirit were fine things which nevertheless tended to take second place to the combination of courage, bravery, the indomitable human spirit and a six-to-one superiority of numbers. (J)
‘Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.’ (J)
‘Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.’ (J)
‘It’s a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done before,’ said Nobby.
‘Right,’ said Sergeant Colon. They walked on in silence for a while and he added: ‘O’ course, that’s not difficult.’ (J)
Making history, it turned out, was quite easy. It was what got written down. It was as simple as that. (J)
... the intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. (J)
And Sam Vimes ran. He tore off his cloak and whirled away his plumed hat, and he ran and ran.
There would be trouble later on. People would ask questions. But that was later on – for now, gloriously uncomplicated and wonderfully clean, and hopefully with never an end, under a clear sky, in a world untarnished…there was only the chase. (J)
The sinking of continents is usually accompanied by volcanoes, earthquakes, and armadas of little boats containing old men anxious to build pyramids and mystic stone circles in some new land where being the possessor of genuine ancient occult wisdom might be expected to attract girls. (J)
As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus. (J)
People live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work every day, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear. (J)
Detritus's intelligence wasn't too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line-dancer, but you could rely on him not to let it slow him down. (J)
... he listened with great care because what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That's where the things were that they hoped he didn't know and didn't want him to find out. (J)
‘Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.’ (J)
‘Well, there’s…’ Colon racked his brains. ‘There’s al-gebra. That’s like sums with letters. For…for people whose brains aren’t clever enough for numbers, see?’ (J)
It wasn’t proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing. (J)
And there was nothing finer than a wizard dressed up formally, until someone could find a way of inflating a Bird of Paradise, possibly by using an elastic band and some kind of gas. (J)
'I hope you are not impugning my men, sir.'
'Vimes, Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs have never been pugn'd in their entire lives.' (J)
'Can't argue with the truth, sir.'
'In my experience, Vimes, you can argue with anything.' (J)
'One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,' said Vetinari, after some thought, 'is that they very seldom explode.' (J)
... you couldn't really imprison someone like Leonard of Quirm. The most you could do was lock up his body. The gods alone knew where his mind went. (J)
No wonder this man was a diplomat. You couldn’t trust him an inch, he thought in loops, and you couldn’t help liking him despite it. (J)
And if the Patrician was anything, he was the political equivalent of the old lady who saves bits of string because you never know when they might come in handy. (J)
After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way. (J)
After all, when you seek advice from someone it's certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself. (J
The unofficial entrance to the University has always been known only to students. What most students failed to remember was that the senior members of the faculty had also been students once, and also liked to get out and about after the official shutting of the gates. This naturally led to a certain amount of embarrassment and diplomacy on dark evenings. (J)
No-one could be so simple, no-one could be so creatively dumb, without being very intelligent. It was like being an actor. Only a very good actor was any good at being a bad actor. (J)
It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus. (J)
‘This belonged to my great-granddad,’ he said. ‘He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole.’
‘Pretty miraculous,’ Carrot agreed.
‘Yeah, it was, I s’pose,’ said the sergeant. He looked ruefully at the battered volume. ‘Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really.’ (J)
One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. (J)
Downstairs, Sybil had cooked him a meal. She wasn’t a very good cook. This was fine by Vimes, because he wasn’t a very good eater. (J)
‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,’ said Carrot.
‘Really? Well, there’s eleven of them.’ (J)
‘D’reg?’ said Angua.
‘A warlike desert tribe,’ said Carrot. ‘Very fierce. Honourable, though. They say that if a D’reg is your friend he’s your friend for the rest of your life.’
‘And if he’s not your friend?’
‘That’s about five seconds.’ (J)
‘You, sir, are no gentleman,’ said Rust.
‘I knew there was something about me that I liked.’ (J)
…he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable then of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? (J)
The Librarian shyly held out a small, battered green book. Vimes had been expecting something bigger, but he took it anyway. It paid to look at any book the orang-utan gave you. He matched you up to books. Vimes supposed it was a knack, in the same way that an undertaker was very good at judging heights. (J)
‘… they say there’s a thin line between genius and madness…’
‘He’s fallen off it, then.’ (J)
... what was so special about 'special qualities'? Limpets had special qualities. (J)
'Tell me, sergeant, are you of a nautical persuasion?'
Colon saluted again. 'Nossir! Happily married man, sir!' (J)
The city of Genua had run out of royalty, inbreeding having progressed to the point where the sole remaining example consisted mostly of teeth ... (J)
‘It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country,’ he read. ‘This means both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.’ (J)
‘You can tell me about appointments I don’t know about?’ said Vimes.
‘They’re still appointments sine qua appointments,’ said the demon. ‘They exist, as it were, in appointment phase space.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Look,’ said the demon patiently, ‘You can have an appointment at any time, right? So therefore any appointment exists in potentia -’
“Where’s that?’
‘Any particular appointment simply collapses the waveform,’ said the demon, ‘I merely select the most likely one from the projected matrix.’ (J)
... history was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started to follow bad orders. (J)
To history, choices are merely directions. (J)
…the Patrician was against printing, because if people knew too much it would only bother them. (J)
No-one likes being told it’s their lucky day. That sort of thing does not bode well. When someone tells you it’s your lucky day, something bad is about to happen. (J)
‘Odd thing, ain’t it…you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.’ (J)
71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no-one else believed. (J)
The sudden appearance of a naked woman always caused a rethink of anyone’s immediate plans. (J)
She was aware that she had a slight advantage over male werewolves in that naked women caused fewer complaints, although the downside was that they got some pressing invitations. Some kind of covering was essential, for modesty and the prevention of inconvenient bouncing, which was why fashioning impromptu clothes out of anything to hand was a lesser-known werewolf skill. (J)
...to a werewolf all humans looked alike: they looked appetizing. (J)
... he was suffering simultaneously from claustrophobia and agoraphobia. He was afraid of everything in here and everything out there at the same time. (J)
‘C’mon, sarge, you know it’s not a proper tattoo unless no-one can remember how it got there.’ (J)
‘Fortune favours the brave, sir,’ said Carrot cheerfully.
‘Good. Good. Pleased to hear it, captain. What is her position vis à vis heavily armed, well prepared and excessively manned armies?’
‘Oh, no-one’s ever heard of Fortune favouring them, sir.’ (J)
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.” (J)
Vimes awoke with a noseful of camel. There are far worse awakenings, but not as many as you might think. (J)
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way. (J)
The night is always old. He’d walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. (J)
Colon had always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them go out and die famously for god, country, and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made. It had never occurred to him that they might do it because they’d get yelled at if they didn’t. (J)
And Sergeant Colon once again knew a secret about bravery. It was arguable a kind of enhanced cowardice – the knowledge that while death may await you if you advance it will be a picnic compared to the certain living hell that awaits should you retreat. (J)
Experience had taught him never to say things like 'I don't like it, it's too quiet.' There was no such thing as too quiet. (J)
Attacking a dangerous enemy who isn't there is one of the more attractive forms of warfare ... (J)
'I love the idea of giving in without a fight. I've fought for ten years and giving in without a fight is what I've always wanted to do.' (J)
'... Carrot takes an interest. He doesn't even think about it. He makes space in his head for people. He takes an interest, and so people think they're interesting. They feel .... better when he's around.' (J)
Animals tended to like Nobby. He didn’t smell wrong. (J)
One of the minor laws of the narrative universe is that any homely featured man who has, for some reason, to disguise himself as a woman will apparently become attractive to some otherwise perfectly sane men with. As the ancient scrolls say, hilarious results. (J)
'Legends are prone to inflation.' (J)
He believed, along with General Tacticus, that courage, bravery and the indomitable human spirit were fine things which nevertheless tended to take second place to the combination of courage, bravery, the indomitable human spirit and a six-to-one superiority of numbers. (J)
‘Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.’ (J)
‘Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.’ (J)
‘It’s a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done before,’ said Nobby.
‘Right,’ said Sergeant Colon. They walked on in silence for a while and he added: ‘O’ course, that’s not difficult.’ (J)
Making history, it turned out, was quite easy. It was what got written down. It was as simple as that. (J)
... the intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. (J)
And Sam Vimes ran. He tore off his cloak and whirled away his plumed hat, and he ran and ran.
There would be trouble later on. People would ask questions. But that was later on – for now, gloriously uncomplicated and wonderfully clean, and hopefully with never an end, under a clear sky, in a world untarnished…there was only the chase. (J)
