Mort by Terry Pratchett
It was also acutely embarrassing to Mort’s family that the youngest son was not at all serious and had about the same talent for horticulture that you would find in a dead starfish. It wasn’t that he was unhelpful, but he had the kind of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread. (M)
... Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them. (M)
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it’s the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals. (M)
‘But you’re Death,’ said Mort. ‘You go around killing people!’ I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT’D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN’T IT? (M)
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed. (M)
Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound. (M)
Mort had never heard the phrase “Pre-Raphaelite”, which was a pity because it would have been almost the right description. However, such girls tend to be on the translucent, consumptive side, whereas this one had a slight suggestion of too much chocolate. (M)
Albert grunted. ‘Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?’
Mort thought for a moment.
‘No,’ he said eventually, ‘what?’
There was silence.
Then Albert straightened up and said, ‘Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ‘em right.’ (M)
‘I’ve never seen Death actually at work.’
‘Not many have,’ said Albert. ‘Not twice, at any rate.’ (M)
THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THE WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. (M)
…YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE.
‘What’s that?’
A SHARP EDGE. (M)
This part of Ankh-Morpork was known as The Shades, an inner-city area sorely in need either of governmental help or, for preference, a flamethrower. It couldn’t be called squalid because that would be stretching the word to breaking point. It was beyond squalor and out the other side, where by a sort of Einsteinian reversal it achieved a magnificent horribleness that it wore like an architectural award. (M)
… although it was a complicated recipe one taste had been enough to know that it was made out of fish entrails marinated for several years in a vat of shark bile. (M)
There are many things to be said about cabbages. One may talk at length about their high vitamin content, their vital iron contribution, the valuable roughage and commendable food value. In the mass, however, they lack a certain something: despite their claim to immense nutritional and moral superiority over, say, daffodils, they have never been a sight to inspire the poet’s muse. Unless he was hungry, of course. (M)
A stuffed alligator is absolutely standard equipment in any properly-run magical establishment. This one looked as though it hadn’t enjoyed it much. (M)
She leaned forward and gave him a kiss as insubstantial as a mayfly’s sigh, fading as she did so until only the kiss was left, just like a Cheshire cat only much more erotic. (M)
‘You may want to hold on to your job, but will you ever be able to let it go?’ (M)
There had been a sound like someone making no noise at all. Forget peas and mattresses – sheer natural selection had established over the years that the royal families that survived the longest were those whose members could distinguish an assassin in the dark by the noise he was clever enough not to make …. (M)
‘If you scream I’ll regret it.’ (M)
… Mort’s innate honesty will never make him a poet; if Mort ever compared a girl to a summer’s day it would have been followed by a thoughtful explanation of what day he had in mind and whether it was raining at the time. (M)
… she made it clear that the only difference between Mort and a dead toad was the colour. (M)
He’d never plucked up the courage to try Albert’s porridge, which led a private life of its own in the depths of its saucepan and ate spoons. (M)
She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t really worth the effort. (M)
‘You’re dead,’ he said.
Keli waited. She couldn’t think of any suitable reply. ‘I’m not’ lacked a certain style, while ‘Is it serious?’ seemed somehow too frivolous. (M)
‘You’re a lot luckier than most dead people, if you look at it objectively,’ he said. ‘You’re alive to enjoy it.’ (M)
He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower. (M)
‘Obviously we shouldn’t get married if only for the sake of the children.’ (M)
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn’t realised that it could make you stupid. (M)
History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always – eventually – manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time. (M)
People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. (M)
It was a cold night, the type of night when frost and fog fight for domination and every sound is muffled. (M)
He sighed and pushed open the door.
As one man, the assembled company stopped talking and stared at him with the honest rural stare that suggests that for two pins they’ll hit you around the head with a shovel and bury your body under a compost heap at full moon. (M)
Terpsic Mims was not a dropout. He was an angler. There is a difference; angling is more expensive. (M)
So long as he caught nothing Terpsic Mims was one of the Disc’s happiest anglers, because the Hakrull river was five miles from his home and therefore five miles from Mrs Gwladys Mims, with whom he had enjoyed six happy months of married life. That had been some twenty years previously. (M)
Some people like to settle down with a good book. No-one in possession of a complete set of marbles would like to settle down with a book of magic, because even the individual words have a private and vindictive life of their own and reading them, in short, is a kind of mental Indian wrestling. Many a young wizard has tried to read a grimoire that is too strong for him, and people who’ve heard the screams have found only his pointy shoes with the classic wisp of smoke coming out of them and book which is, perhaps, just a little fatter. (M)
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote. (M)
Every drinking place throughout the multiverse has them – those shelves of weirdly-shaped, sticky bottles that not only contain exotically-named liquid, which is often blue or green, but also odds and ends that bottles of real drink would never stoop to contain, such as whole fruits, bits of twig and, in extreme cases, small drowned lizards. No-one knows why barmen stock so many, since they all taste like treacle dissolved in turpentine. (M)
‘I must say,’ he said, ‘you’re a real brick.’
‘You mean pink, square and dumpy? You really know how to talk to a girl, my boy.’ (M)
Death began to feel that he wouldn’t understand people as long as he lived. (M)
‘It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of going into teaching?’
Death’s face was a mask of terror. Well it was always a mask of terror, but this time he meant it to be. (M)
Then Mort said, ‘What do all those symbols mean?’
‘Sodomy non sapiens,’ said Albert under his breath.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Means I’m buggered if I know.’ (M)
An hour ago Cutwell had thumbed through the index of The Monster Fun Grimoire and had cautiously assembled a number of common household ingredients and put a match to them.
Funny thing about eyebrows, he mused. You never really noticed them until they’d gone. (M)
THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST ME. (M)
‘Death doesn’t frighten me. It’s what comes after.’ (M)
‘Pardon me for living, I’m sure.’
NO-ONE GETS PARDONED FOR LIVING. (M)
‘Look, how about this? Let’s pretend we’ve had the row and I’ve won. See? It saves a lot of effort.’ (M)
It’s a fact of life that everyone is on one side or other of a wall, so the only thing to do is forget about it or evolve stronger fingers. (M)
The Rite of AshkEnte, quite simply, summons and binds Death. Students of the occult will be aware that it can be performed with a simple incantation, three small bits of wood and 4cc of mouse blood, but no wizard worth his pointy hat would dream of doing anything so unimpressive; they knew in their hearts that if a spell didn’t involve big yellow candles, lots of rare incense, circles drawn on the floor with eight different colours of chalk and a few cauldrons around the place then it simply wasn’t worth contemplating. (M)
The change in Albert’s voice was complete. The trumpets of command had become the piccolos of supplication. (M)
There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you’d really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. (M)
There should be a word for the microscopic spark of hope that you dare not entertain in case the mere act of acknowledging it will cause it to vanish, like trying to look at a photon. You can only sidle up to it, looking past it, walking past it, waiting for it to get big enough to face the world. (M)
‘This isn’t the kind of man who ties you up in a cellar with just enough time for the mice to eat through your ropes before the floodwaters rise. This is the kind of man that just kills you here and now.’ (M)
‘Goodbye,’ Mort said, and was surprised to find a lump in his throat. ‘It’s such an unpleasant word, isn’t it?’
QUITE SO. Death grinned because, as has so often been remarked, he didn’t have much option. But possibly he meant it, this time.
I PREFER AU REVOIR, he said. (M)
... Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them. (M)
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it’s the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals. (M)
‘But you’re Death,’ said Mort. ‘You go around killing people!’ I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT’D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN’T IT? (M)
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed. (M)
Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound. (M)
Mort had never heard the phrase “Pre-Raphaelite”, which was a pity because it would have been almost the right description. However, such girls tend to be on the translucent, consumptive side, whereas this one had a slight suggestion of too much chocolate. (M)
Albert grunted. ‘Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?’
Mort thought for a moment.
‘No,’ he said eventually, ‘what?’
There was silence.
Then Albert straightened up and said, ‘Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ‘em right.’ (M)
‘I’ve never seen Death actually at work.’
‘Not many have,’ said Albert. ‘Not twice, at any rate.’ (M)
THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THE WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. (M)
…YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE.
‘What’s that?’
A SHARP EDGE. (M)
This part of Ankh-Morpork was known as The Shades, an inner-city area sorely in need either of governmental help or, for preference, a flamethrower. It couldn’t be called squalid because that would be stretching the word to breaking point. It was beyond squalor and out the other side, where by a sort of Einsteinian reversal it achieved a magnificent horribleness that it wore like an architectural award. (M)
… although it was a complicated recipe one taste had been enough to know that it was made out of fish entrails marinated for several years in a vat of shark bile. (M)
There are many things to be said about cabbages. One may talk at length about their high vitamin content, their vital iron contribution, the valuable roughage and commendable food value. In the mass, however, they lack a certain something: despite their claim to immense nutritional and moral superiority over, say, daffodils, they have never been a sight to inspire the poet’s muse. Unless he was hungry, of course. (M)
A stuffed alligator is absolutely standard equipment in any properly-run magical establishment. This one looked as though it hadn’t enjoyed it much. (M)
She leaned forward and gave him a kiss as insubstantial as a mayfly’s sigh, fading as she did so until only the kiss was left, just like a Cheshire cat only much more erotic. (M)
‘You may want to hold on to your job, but will you ever be able to let it go?’ (M)
There had been a sound like someone making no noise at all. Forget peas and mattresses – sheer natural selection had established over the years that the royal families that survived the longest were those whose members could distinguish an assassin in the dark by the noise he was clever enough not to make …. (M)
‘If you scream I’ll regret it.’ (M)
… Mort’s innate honesty will never make him a poet; if Mort ever compared a girl to a summer’s day it would have been followed by a thoughtful explanation of what day he had in mind and whether it was raining at the time. (M)
… she made it clear that the only difference between Mort and a dead toad was the colour. (M)
He’d never plucked up the courage to try Albert’s porridge, which led a private life of its own in the depths of its saucepan and ate spoons. (M)
She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t really worth the effort. (M)
‘You’re dead,’ he said.
Keli waited. She couldn’t think of any suitable reply. ‘I’m not’ lacked a certain style, while ‘Is it serious?’ seemed somehow too frivolous. (M)
‘You’re a lot luckier than most dead people, if you look at it objectively,’ he said. ‘You’re alive to enjoy it.’ (M)
He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower. (M)
‘Obviously we shouldn’t get married if only for the sake of the children.’ (M)
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn’t realised that it could make you stupid. (M)
History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always – eventually – manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time. (M)
People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. (M)
It was a cold night, the type of night when frost and fog fight for domination and every sound is muffled. (M)
He sighed and pushed open the door.
As one man, the assembled company stopped talking and stared at him with the honest rural stare that suggests that for two pins they’ll hit you around the head with a shovel and bury your body under a compost heap at full moon. (M)
Terpsic Mims was not a dropout. He was an angler. There is a difference; angling is more expensive. (M)
So long as he caught nothing Terpsic Mims was one of the Disc’s happiest anglers, because the Hakrull river was five miles from his home and therefore five miles from Mrs Gwladys Mims, with whom he had enjoyed six happy months of married life. That had been some twenty years previously. (M)
Some people like to settle down with a good book. No-one in possession of a complete set of marbles would like to settle down with a book of magic, because even the individual words have a private and vindictive life of their own and reading them, in short, is a kind of mental Indian wrestling. Many a young wizard has tried to read a grimoire that is too strong for him, and people who’ve heard the screams have found only his pointy shoes with the classic wisp of smoke coming out of them and book which is, perhaps, just a little fatter. (M)
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote. (M)
Every drinking place throughout the multiverse has them – those shelves of weirdly-shaped, sticky bottles that not only contain exotically-named liquid, which is often blue or green, but also odds and ends that bottles of real drink would never stoop to contain, such as whole fruits, bits of twig and, in extreme cases, small drowned lizards. No-one knows why barmen stock so many, since they all taste like treacle dissolved in turpentine. (M)
‘I must say,’ he said, ‘you’re a real brick.’
‘You mean pink, square and dumpy? You really know how to talk to a girl, my boy.’ (M)
Death began to feel that he wouldn’t understand people as long as he lived. (M)
‘It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of going into teaching?’
Death’s face was a mask of terror. Well it was always a mask of terror, but this time he meant it to be. (M)
Then Mort said, ‘What do all those symbols mean?’
‘Sodomy non sapiens,’ said Albert under his breath.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Means I’m buggered if I know.’ (M)
An hour ago Cutwell had thumbed through the index of The Monster Fun Grimoire and had cautiously assembled a number of common household ingredients and put a match to them.
Funny thing about eyebrows, he mused. You never really noticed them until they’d gone. (M)
THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST ME. (M)
‘Death doesn’t frighten me. It’s what comes after.’ (M)
‘Pardon me for living, I’m sure.’
NO-ONE GETS PARDONED FOR LIVING. (M)
‘Look, how about this? Let’s pretend we’ve had the row and I’ve won. See? It saves a lot of effort.’ (M)
It’s a fact of life that everyone is on one side or other of a wall, so the only thing to do is forget about it or evolve stronger fingers. (M)
The Rite of AshkEnte, quite simply, summons and binds Death. Students of the occult will be aware that it can be performed with a simple incantation, three small bits of wood and 4cc of mouse blood, but no wizard worth his pointy hat would dream of doing anything so unimpressive; they knew in their hearts that if a spell didn’t involve big yellow candles, lots of rare incense, circles drawn on the floor with eight different colours of chalk and a few cauldrons around the place then it simply wasn’t worth contemplating. (M)
The change in Albert’s voice was complete. The trumpets of command had become the piccolos of supplication. (M)
There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you’d really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. (M)
There should be a word for the microscopic spark of hope that you dare not entertain in case the mere act of acknowledging it will cause it to vanish, like trying to look at a photon. You can only sidle up to it, looking past it, walking past it, waiting for it to get big enough to face the world. (M)
‘This isn’t the kind of man who ties you up in a cellar with just enough time for the mice to eat through your ropes before the floodwaters rise. This is the kind of man that just kills you here and now.’ (M)
‘Goodbye,’ Mort said, and was surprised to find a lump in his throat. ‘It’s such an unpleasant word, isn’t it?’
QUITE SO. Death grinned because, as has so often been remarked, he didn’t have much option. But possibly he meant it, this time.
I PREFER AU REVOIR, he said. (M)
