Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
He could think in italics. Such people need watching.
Preferably from a safe distance. (MA)
It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself. (MA)
‘What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?’ (MA)
… he was the sort of person who always took laughter personally. (MA)
The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger. (MA)
Mr Flannel looked Angua up and down. Men seldom missed the opportunity. (MA)
A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness. (MA)
‘Dwarfs and trolls get along like a house on fires’, said Nobby. ‘Ever been in a burning house, miss?’ (MA)
Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.
Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid. (MA)
‘Hah! Your uniform doesn’t scare me,’ he said.
Vimes looked down at his battered breastplate and worn mail.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is not a scary uniform. I’m sorry. Forward, Corporal Carrot and Lance-Constable Detritus.’
The Assassin was suddenly aware of the sunlight being blocked out.
‘Now these, I think you’ll agree,’ said Vimes, from somewhere behind the eclipse, ‘are scary uniforms.’ (MA)
‘Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,’ he said. (MA)
…all dogs don’t talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored. (MA)
The most dangerous man in the world should be introduced.
He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead, and had marvelled at how well they’d been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labour. For several years he hadn’t moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There’s a certain type of person it’s very hard to imprison. (MA)
Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind had been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork. (MA)
That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know. (MA)
… when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme. (MA)
Dwarfs are known for their sense of humour, in a way. People point them out and say: ‘Those little devils haven’t got a sense of humour.’ (MA)
Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying ‘Got rocks in your head?’ to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful. (MA)
‘Don’t stick your nose in where someone can pull it off and eat it.’ (MA)
He’d faced trolls and dwarf and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich. (MA)
‘Do you think there’s such a thing as a criminal mind?’
Carrot almost audibly tried to work it out.
‘What ... you mean like ... Mr Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?’
‘He’s not a criminal.’
‘You have eaten one of his pies, sir?’ (MA)
There were people who’d steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else. (MA)
The River Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse. (MA)
No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you. Someone had to be the butt of the world. (MA)
‘Well, Nobby, you’re what I might call a career soldier, right?’ ‘‘S’right, Fred.’
‘How many dishonourable discharges have you had?’
‘Lots,’ said Nobby, proudly. ‘But I always puts a poultice on ‘em.’ (MA)
Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore – according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind – it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing. (MA)
‘Have you ever eaten dwarf bread?’
‘No.’
‘Everyone should try it once,’ said Carrot. He appeared to consider this. ‘Most people do,’ he added. (MA)
...it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before. (MA)
So many crimes are solved by a happy accident – by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi … (MA)
Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realising that most of his customers want meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits. (MA)
Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law. (MA)
The Axiom 'Honest men have nothing to fear from the police' is currently under review by the Axioms Review Board. (MA)
... money in the possession of other people had always seemed to Throat to be against the proper natural order of things. (MA)
C.M.O.T. Dibbler had a number of bad points, but species prejudice was not one of them. He liked anyone who had money, regardless of the colour and shape of the hand that was proffering it. (MA)
... mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true. (MA)
Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go. (MA)
In this he was echoing the Patrician’s view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done. (MA)
He was one of those people who would recoil from an assault on strength, but attack weakness without mercy. (MA)
Consider orang-utans.
In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It’s just that they talk in Orang-utan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment. (MA)
The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orang-utan/Human Dictionary. He’d been working on it for three months.
It wasn’t easy. He’d got as far as ‘Oook’. (MA)
The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. (MA)
You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school. (MA)
‘We are armed with the truth. What can harm us if we are armed with the truth?’
‘Well, a crossbow bolt can, e.g., go right through your eye and out the back of your head,’ said Sergeant Colon. (MA)
Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. (MA)
'.... there's big crimes and little crimes. Sometimes the little crimes look big and the big crimes you can hardly see, but the crucial thing is to decide which is which.' (MA)
Gaspode had a way of turning up silently like a small puff of methane in a crowded room, and with the latter’s distressing ability to fill up all available space. (MA)
You didn't need daft old herbs to make your life a problem, if you spent one week every month with two extra legs and four extra nipples. (MA)
Dogs were brighter than wolves. Wolves didn't need intelligence. They had other things. But dogs ... they'd been given intelligence by humans. Whether they wanted it or not. They were certainly more vicious than wolves. They'd got that from humans too. (MA)
‘He’s mad, isn’t he?’
‘No, mad’s when you froth at the mouf,’ said Gaspode. ‘He’s insane. That’s when you froth at the brain.’ (MA)
When you were a Watchman, you were a Watchman all the time, which was a bit of a bargain for the city since it only paid you to be a Watchman for ten hours of every day. (MA)
‘People ought to think for themselves, Captain Vimes says. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to.’ (MA)
… there’s nothing more useless in the world than a groom just before the wedding. (MA)
Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. (MA)
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.
They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word. (MA)
It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear - they just stored up your muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn’t use it, it used you. (MA)
Preferably from a safe distance. (MA)
It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself. (MA)
‘What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?’ (MA)
… he was the sort of person who always took laughter personally. (MA)
The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger. (MA)
Mr Flannel looked Angua up and down. Men seldom missed the opportunity. (MA)
A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness. (MA)
‘Dwarfs and trolls get along like a house on fires’, said Nobby. ‘Ever been in a burning house, miss?’ (MA)
Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.
Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid. (MA)
‘Hah! Your uniform doesn’t scare me,’ he said.
Vimes looked down at his battered breastplate and worn mail.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is not a scary uniform. I’m sorry. Forward, Corporal Carrot and Lance-Constable Detritus.’
The Assassin was suddenly aware of the sunlight being blocked out.
‘Now these, I think you’ll agree,’ said Vimes, from somewhere behind the eclipse, ‘are scary uniforms.’ (MA)
‘Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,’ he said. (MA)
…all dogs don’t talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored. (MA)
The most dangerous man in the world should be introduced.
He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead, and had marvelled at how well they’d been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labour. For several years he hadn’t moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There’s a certain type of person it’s very hard to imprison. (MA)
Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind had been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork. (MA)
That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know. (MA)
… when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme. (MA)
Dwarfs are known for their sense of humour, in a way. People point them out and say: ‘Those little devils haven’t got a sense of humour.’ (MA)
Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying ‘Got rocks in your head?’ to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful. (MA)
‘Don’t stick your nose in where someone can pull it off and eat it.’ (MA)
He’d faced trolls and dwarf and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich. (MA)
‘Do you think there’s such a thing as a criminal mind?’
Carrot almost audibly tried to work it out.
‘What ... you mean like ... Mr Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?’
‘He’s not a criminal.’
‘You have eaten one of his pies, sir?’ (MA)
There were people who’d steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else. (MA)
The River Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse. (MA)
No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you. Someone had to be the butt of the world. (MA)
‘Well, Nobby, you’re what I might call a career soldier, right?’ ‘‘S’right, Fred.’
‘How many dishonourable discharges have you had?’
‘Lots,’ said Nobby, proudly. ‘But I always puts a poultice on ‘em.’ (MA)
Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore – according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind – it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing. (MA)
‘Have you ever eaten dwarf bread?’
‘No.’
‘Everyone should try it once,’ said Carrot. He appeared to consider this. ‘Most people do,’ he added. (MA)
...it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before. (MA)
So many crimes are solved by a happy accident – by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi … (MA)
Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realising that most of his customers want meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits. (MA)
Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law. (MA)
The Axiom 'Honest men have nothing to fear from the police' is currently under review by the Axioms Review Board. (MA)
... money in the possession of other people had always seemed to Throat to be against the proper natural order of things. (MA)
C.M.O.T. Dibbler had a number of bad points, but species prejudice was not one of them. He liked anyone who had money, regardless of the colour and shape of the hand that was proffering it. (MA)
... mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true. (MA)
Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go. (MA)
In this he was echoing the Patrician’s view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done. (MA)
He was one of those people who would recoil from an assault on strength, but attack weakness without mercy. (MA)
Consider orang-utans.
In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It’s just that they talk in Orang-utan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment. (MA)
The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orang-utan/Human Dictionary. He’d been working on it for three months.
It wasn’t easy. He’d got as far as ‘Oook’. (MA)
The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. (MA)
You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school. (MA)
‘We are armed with the truth. What can harm us if we are armed with the truth?’
‘Well, a crossbow bolt can, e.g., go right through your eye and out the back of your head,’ said Sergeant Colon. (MA)
Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. (MA)
'.... there's big crimes and little crimes. Sometimes the little crimes look big and the big crimes you can hardly see, but the crucial thing is to decide which is which.' (MA)
Gaspode had a way of turning up silently like a small puff of methane in a crowded room, and with the latter’s distressing ability to fill up all available space. (MA)
You didn't need daft old herbs to make your life a problem, if you spent one week every month with two extra legs and four extra nipples. (MA)
Dogs were brighter than wolves. Wolves didn't need intelligence. They had other things. But dogs ... they'd been given intelligence by humans. Whether they wanted it or not. They were certainly more vicious than wolves. They'd got that from humans too. (MA)
‘He’s mad, isn’t he?’
‘No, mad’s when you froth at the mouf,’ said Gaspode. ‘He’s insane. That’s when you froth at the brain.’ (MA)
When you were a Watchman, you were a Watchman all the time, which was a bit of a bargain for the city since it only paid you to be a Watchman for ten hours of every day. (MA)
‘People ought to think for themselves, Captain Vimes says. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to.’ (MA)
… there’s nothing more useless in the world than a groom just before the wedding. (MA)
Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. (MA)
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.
They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word. (MA)
It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear - they just stored up your muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn’t use it, it used you. (MA)