Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
It wasn’t that he’d liked being shot at by hooded figures in the temporary employ of his many and varied enemies, but he’d always looked at it as some kind of vote of confidence. It showed that he was annoying the rich and arrogant people who ought to be annoyed. (NW)
He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armour. It was gilt by association. (NW)
The cemetery of Small Gods was for people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked Misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much. (NW)
Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see. (NW)
‘…it’s even easier to be a crook when no one knows you’re a crook, haha. But coppering depends on people believing you’re a copper.’ (NW)
... Vimes found it better to look at Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. (NW)
... Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armour around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. (NW)
‘It’s funny how secretly you can move when you’re a loony monk dancing through the streets beating a drum.’ (NW)
When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. (NW)
‘... disharmony, like a cat, gets everywhere.’ (NW)
‘And then there’s quantum, of course.’ The monk sighed. ‘There’s always bloody quantum.’ (NW)
‘It’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.’ (NW)
He was a man whose mind was ponderous enough to have momentum; it was quite hard for his thoughts to change direction. (NW)
If you moved with authority, you got a second or two extra. Authority was everything. (NW)
‘A copper doesn’t keep flapping his lip. He doesn’t let on what he knows. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking. No. He watches and listens and he learns and he bides his time. His mind works like mad but his face is a blank. Until he’s ready.’ (NW)
‘... you doctors aren’t supposed to hurt people, are you?’
‘Only in the course of normal incompetence.’ (NW)
‘You’re an interesting man, sergeant. You make enemies like a craftsman.’ (NW)
He didn’t look around, and watch and learn, and then say, ‘This is how people are, how do we deal with it?’ No, he sat and thought: ‘This is how the people ought to be, how can we change them?’ And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper ... (NW)
It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. (NW)
Everyone was guilty of something. Vines knew that. Every copper knew that. That was how you maintained your authority... (NW)
... there was something about his expression, as of a rat who was expecting cheese right around the next corner, and had been expecting cheese around the last corner too, and the corner before that, and, although the world has turned out so far to be full of corners yet completely innocent of any cheese at all, was nevertheless quite certain that, just around the corner, cheese awaited. (NW)
Dibbler’s pies quite often looked appetising. Therein lay their one and only charm. (NW)
Swordfish? Every password was swordfish! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose swordfish. It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind. (NW)
That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t the you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then. (NW)
‘Mum’s are mums, Lance-Corporal. They don’t like to see men managing by themselves, in case that sort of thing catches on.’ (NW)
We’re going to get cheesed.*
* Like creamed, but it goes on for a lot longer. (NW)
The Assassin moved quietly from roof to roof until he was well away from the excitement around the Watch House.
His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine against things. (NW)
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. (NW)
He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn’t be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence. (NW)
Oh dear, here we go again, thought Vimes. Why did I wait until I was married to become strangely attractive to powerful women? Why didn’t it happen to me when I was sixteen? I could have done with it then. (NW)
‘I’ve met a few incorruptible men,’ said Madam Meserole. ‘They tend to die horrible deaths. The world balances out, you see. A corrupt man in a good world, or a good man in a corrupt one…the equation comes out the same. The world does not deal well with those who don’t pick a side.’
‘I like the middle,’ said Vimes.
‘That gives you two enemies.’ (NW)
‘An’ there’s some kid outside says he’s got to speak to you, hnah, specially,’ Snouty went on. ‘Shall I give him a clip alongside the head?’
‘What does he smell like?' said Vimes, sipping the scalding corrosive tea.
‘Bottom of a baboon’s cage, sarge.’
‘Ah, Nobby Nobbs.’ (NW)
‘Spoons are not important at this point!’ (NW)
…Nature is bountiful where idiots are concerned. (NW)
‘But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.’ (NW)
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of ‘Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory’ school of applied warfare. But Rust’s lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts. (NW)
... Rust was always a man to interrupt an answer with a demand for the answer he was in fact interrupting. (NW)
…trouble is always easy to find, when you have enough people looking for it. (NW)
One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people make instead of thinking. (NW)
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. (NW)
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. (NW)
…humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them. (NW)
Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that’s who. (NW)
…he had that furtive look of a timid domestic poisoner about him, the kind of man who’d be appalled at the idea of divorce but would plot womanslaughter every day. And you could see why. (NW)
‘And are your men sober and clean-living?’ the woman demanded.
‘Whenever no alternative presents itself ma’am,’ said Vimes. (NW)
He didn’t make a very good revolutionary. People as meticulously fervent as Reg got real revolutionaries worried. (NW)
…every army needs, in key if unglamorous posts, men who can reason and make lists and arrange provisions and baggage wagons and, in general, have an attention span greater than a duck. (NW)
When he was a boy he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines. (NW)
It takes a long time for anything to happen inside the head of an ox, but, when it does, it happens extensively. (NW)
... a cartwheel rolled out of the smoke and away down the road. This always happens. (NW)
People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour. (NW)
‘Maybe the best way to build a bright new world is to peel some spuds in this one?’ (NW)
A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times. (NW)
It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole lives nevertheless spent their life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed…
…and gave back the dung from its pens and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also its clothes, and fashions and ideas and interesting vices, songs and knowledge and something which if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That’s what civilization meant. It meant the city. (NW)
‘The best place for urban fighting is right out in the countryside, sir, where there’s nothing else in the way.’ (NW)
... upper class etiquette in Ankh-Morpork held that, while you could snub your friends any time you felt like it, it was the height of bad form to be impolite to your worst enemy. (NW)
A certain realization dawned on him.
‘Oh,’ he said.
YES, said Death.
‘Not even time to finish my cake?’
NO. THERE IS NO MORE TIME, EVEN FOR CAKE. FOR YOU, THE CAKE IS OVER. YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE. (NW)
…those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and in any case were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Lords come and go, but dust accumulates. (NW)
One thing Vimes was learning fast was the natural vindictiveness of old ladies, who had no sense of fair play when it came to fighting soldiers; give a granny a spear and a hole to jab it through, and young men on the other side were in big trouble. (NW)
If Ankh-Morpork had a grid, there would have been gridlock. Since it did not it was, in the words of Sergeant Colon, ‘a case of no one being able to move because of everyone else’. Admittedly, this phrase, while accurate, did not have the same snap. (NW)
‘Lads you’re just flapping your mouths. There’s been fighting, and here you are with all your arms and legs and walking around in the gods’ good sunlight. That’s winning, that is. You’ve won, see. The rest is just gravy.’ (NW)
When we break down, it all breaks down. (NW)
He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armour. It was gilt by association. (NW)
The cemetery of Small Gods was for people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked Misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much. (NW)
Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see. (NW)
‘…it’s even easier to be a crook when no one knows you’re a crook, haha. But coppering depends on people believing you’re a copper.’ (NW)
... Vimes found it better to look at Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. (NW)
... Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armour around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. (NW)
‘It’s funny how secretly you can move when you’re a loony monk dancing through the streets beating a drum.’ (NW)
When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. (NW)
‘... disharmony, like a cat, gets everywhere.’ (NW)
‘And then there’s quantum, of course.’ The monk sighed. ‘There’s always bloody quantum.’ (NW)
‘It’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.’ (NW)
He was a man whose mind was ponderous enough to have momentum; it was quite hard for his thoughts to change direction. (NW)
If you moved with authority, you got a second or two extra. Authority was everything. (NW)
‘A copper doesn’t keep flapping his lip. He doesn’t let on what he knows. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking. No. He watches and listens and he learns and he bides his time. His mind works like mad but his face is a blank. Until he’s ready.’ (NW)
‘... you doctors aren’t supposed to hurt people, are you?’
‘Only in the course of normal incompetence.’ (NW)
‘You’re an interesting man, sergeant. You make enemies like a craftsman.’ (NW)
He didn’t look around, and watch and learn, and then say, ‘This is how people are, how do we deal with it?’ No, he sat and thought: ‘This is how the people ought to be, how can we change them?’ And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper ... (NW)
It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. (NW)
Everyone was guilty of something. Vines knew that. Every copper knew that. That was how you maintained your authority... (NW)
... there was something about his expression, as of a rat who was expecting cheese right around the next corner, and had been expecting cheese around the last corner too, and the corner before that, and, although the world has turned out so far to be full of corners yet completely innocent of any cheese at all, was nevertheless quite certain that, just around the corner, cheese awaited. (NW)
Dibbler’s pies quite often looked appetising. Therein lay their one and only charm. (NW)
Swordfish? Every password was swordfish! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose swordfish. It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind. (NW)
That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t the you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then. (NW)
‘Mum’s are mums, Lance-Corporal. They don’t like to see men managing by themselves, in case that sort of thing catches on.’ (NW)
We’re going to get cheesed.*
* Like creamed, but it goes on for a lot longer. (NW)
The Assassin moved quietly from roof to roof until he was well away from the excitement around the Watch House.
His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine against things. (NW)
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. (NW)
He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn’t be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence. (NW)
Oh dear, here we go again, thought Vimes. Why did I wait until I was married to become strangely attractive to powerful women? Why didn’t it happen to me when I was sixteen? I could have done with it then. (NW)
‘I’ve met a few incorruptible men,’ said Madam Meserole. ‘They tend to die horrible deaths. The world balances out, you see. A corrupt man in a good world, or a good man in a corrupt one…the equation comes out the same. The world does not deal well with those who don’t pick a side.’
‘I like the middle,’ said Vimes.
‘That gives you two enemies.’ (NW)
‘An’ there’s some kid outside says he’s got to speak to you, hnah, specially,’ Snouty went on. ‘Shall I give him a clip alongside the head?’
‘What does he smell like?' said Vimes, sipping the scalding corrosive tea.
‘Bottom of a baboon’s cage, sarge.’
‘Ah, Nobby Nobbs.’ (NW)
‘Spoons are not important at this point!’ (NW)
…Nature is bountiful where idiots are concerned. (NW)
‘But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.’ (NW)
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of ‘Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory’ school of applied warfare. But Rust’s lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts. (NW)
... Rust was always a man to interrupt an answer with a demand for the answer he was in fact interrupting. (NW)
…trouble is always easy to find, when you have enough people looking for it. (NW)
One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people make instead of thinking. (NW)
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. (NW)
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. (NW)
…humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them. (NW)
Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that’s who. (NW)
…he had that furtive look of a timid domestic poisoner about him, the kind of man who’d be appalled at the idea of divorce but would plot womanslaughter every day. And you could see why. (NW)
‘And are your men sober and clean-living?’ the woman demanded.
‘Whenever no alternative presents itself ma’am,’ said Vimes. (NW)
He didn’t make a very good revolutionary. People as meticulously fervent as Reg got real revolutionaries worried. (NW)
…every army needs, in key if unglamorous posts, men who can reason and make lists and arrange provisions and baggage wagons and, in general, have an attention span greater than a duck. (NW)
When he was a boy he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines. (NW)
It takes a long time for anything to happen inside the head of an ox, but, when it does, it happens extensively. (NW)
... a cartwheel rolled out of the smoke and away down the road. This always happens. (NW)
People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour. (NW)
‘Maybe the best way to build a bright new world is to peel some spuds in this one?’ (NW)
A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times. (NW)
It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole lives nevertheless spent their life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed…
…and gave back the dung from its pens and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also its clothes, and fashions and ideas and interesting vices, songs and knowledge and something which if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That’s what civilization meant. It meant the city. (NW)
‘The best place for urban fighting is right out in the countryside, sir, where there’s nothing else in the way.’ (NW)
... upper class etiquette in Ankh-Morpork held that, while you could snub your friends any time you felt like it, it was the height of bad form to be impolite to your worst enemy. (NW)
A certain realization dawned on him.
‘Oh,’ he said.
YES, said Death.
‘Not even time to finish my cake?’
NO. THERE IS NO MORE TIME, EVEN FOR CAKE. FOR YOU, THE CAKE IS OVER. YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE. (NW)
…those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and in any case were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Lords come and go, but dust accumulates. (NW)
One thing Vimes was learning fast was the natural vindictiveness of old ladies, who had no sense of fair play when it came to fighting soldiers; give a granny a spear and a hole to jab it through, and young men on the other side were in big trouble. (NW)
If Ankh-Morpork had a grid, there would have been gridlock. Since it did not it was, in the words of Sergeant Colon, ‘a case of no one being able to move because of everyone else’. Admittedly, this phrase, while accurate, did not have the same snap. (NW)
‘Lads you’re just flapping your mouths. There’s been fighting, and here you are with all your arms and legs and walking around in the gods’ good sunlight. That’s winning, that is. You’ve won, see. The rest is just gravy.’ (NW)
When we break down, it all breaks down. (NW)
