Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett
Most species do
their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature
intended. And this is all very natural
and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes
that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and
error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone.
This is probably fine from the species’ point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig… (RM)
…in the house of Death there is no time but the present. (There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. It was just an older one.) (RM)
YOU FEAR TO DIE? ‘It’s not that I don’t want…I mean, I’ve always…it’s just that life is a habit that’s hard to break…’ (RM)
...it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place. (RM)
There seemed to be more Mustrum Ridcully than one body could reasonably contain. (RM)
The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centres of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he’s merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at Unseen University was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions. (RM)
The Senior Wrangler could do to a conversation what it takes quite thick treacle to do to the pedals of a precision watch. (RM)
It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000), qualify under the term ‘running’ or, for that matter, ‘water.’ (RM)
C.M.O.T. Dibbler liked to describe himself as a merchant adventurer; everyone else liked to describe him as an itinerant pedlar whose money-making schemes were always let down by some small but vital flaw, such as trying to sell things he didn’t own or which didn’t work or, sometimes, didn’t even exist. (RM)
Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely, giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on. (RM)
Ankh-Morpork has always had a fine tradition of welcoming people of all races, colours and shapes, if they have money to spend and a return ticket. (RM)
The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades was remarkably like the aforesaid well-known astronomical phenomenon: it had a certain strong attraction, no light escaped from it, and it could indeed become a gateway to another world. The next one. (RM)
They said that dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren’t careful bits of you could rot and drop off. (RM)
Inexplicable phenomena were not in themselves unusual on the Discworld. Rains of fish, for example, were so common in the little landlocked village of Pine Dressers that it had a flourishing smoking, canning and kipper-filleting industry. And in the mountain regions of Syrrit many sheep, left out in the fields all night, would be found in the morning to be facing the other way, without the apparent intervention of any human agency. (RM)
He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.
It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. (RM)
Everything that exists, yearns to live. That’s what the cycle of life is all about. That’s the engine that drives the great biological pumps of evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the very top – which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all that effort. (RM)
Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis, the most famous of course being: ‘Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!’, but others have included ‘Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork’, ‘I Fear I’m Going Back to Ankh-Morpork’, and the old favourite, ‘Ankh-Morpork Malady’. (RM)
Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small. (RM)
There were so many pieces of Mrs Cake's mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs Cake but, strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there seemed to be left. (RM)
The Archchancellor was not the kind of man who takes a special pleasure in being brusque and rude to women. Or, to put it another way, he was brusque and rude to absolutely everyone, regardless of sex, which was an equality of a sort. (RM)
Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can. (RM)
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter’s wheel. That’s how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn’t be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies. (RM)
‘Yeah, it’s always the same,’ said Reg Shoe bitterly. ‘Once you’re dead, people just don’t want to know, right? They act as if you’ve got some horrible disease. Dying can happen to anyone, right?’ (RM)
It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny. (RM)
Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason. (RM)
Carmen Miranda could have worn that hat to the funeral of a continent. Mrs Cake travelled underneath it as the basket travels under a balloon. (RM)
‘Why does everyone run towards a blood-curdling scream?’ mumbled the Senior Wrangler. ‘It’s contrary to all sense.’ (RM)
‘It can’t be intelligent, can it?’ said the Bursar.
‘All it’s doing is moving around slowly and eating things,’ said the Dean.
‘Put a pointy hat on it and it’d be a faculty member,’ said the Archchancellor. (RM)
Arguing over petty details at times of dimensional emergency was a familiar wizardly trait. (RM)
People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory. (RM)
I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND. (RM)
The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother. (RM)
‘Have you got any last words? YES. I DON’T WANT TO GO.
‘Well. Succinct, anyway.’ (RM)
Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn’t mean stupid. It just meant that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges. (RM)
Tell me,’ Ludmilla whispered to Ridcully, ‘is this how wizards usually behave?’ ‘The Senior Wrangler is an amazingly fine example,’ said Ridcully. ‘Got the same urgent grasp of reality as a cardboard cut-out. Proud to have him on the team.’ (RM)
‘Oook.’
‘You? We can’t take you,’ said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. ‘You don’t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.’
‘Oook!’ said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean. (RM)
Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off any more clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No spectres haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids.
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do. (RM)
‘What’s the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can’t blow something up?’ (RM)
When she’d heard that her daughter had been invited to the University she’d come too. Mrs Cake always assumed that an invitation to Ludmilla was an invitation to Ludmilla’s mother as well. Mothers like her exist everywhere, and apparently nothing can be done about them. (RM)
In the Ramtops village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. (RM)
There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts. (RM)
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (RM)
LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN? (RM)
... Sergeant Colon did know the meaning of the word "irony". He thought it meant "sort of like iron". (RM)
'... humans are human.'
AND SIXPENCE IS SIXPENCE. BUT CORN IS NOT JUST CORN. (RM)
Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and the very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.
Somewhere, the tiny voice of Bill Door said: from the point of view of the owner, longer ones are best. (RM)
This is probably fine from the species’ point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig… (RM)
…in the house of Death there is no time but the present. (There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. It was just an older one.) (RM)
YOU FEAR TO DIE? ‘It’s not that I don’t want…I mean, I’ve always…it’s just that life is a habit that’s hard to break…’ (RM)
...it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place. (RM)
There seemed to be more Mustrum Ridcully than one body could reasonably contain. (RM)
The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centres of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he’s merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at Unseen University was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions. (RM)
The Senior Wrangler could do to a conversation what it takes quite thick treacle to do to the pedals of a precision watch. (RM)
It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000), qualify under the term ‘running’ or, for that matter, ‘water.’ (RM)
C.M.O.T. Dibbler liked to describe himself as a merchant adventurer; everyone else liked to describe him as an itinerant pedlar whose money-making schemes were always let down by some small but vital flaw, such as trying to sell things he didn’t own or which didn’t work or, sometimes, didn’t even exist. (RM)
Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely, giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on. (RM)
Ankh-Morpork has always had a fine tradition of welcoming people of all races, colours and shapes, if they have money to spend and a return ticket. (RM)
The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades was remarkably like the aforesaid well-known astronomical phenomenon: it had a certain strong attraction, no light escaped from it, and it could indeed become a gateway to another world. The next one. (RM)
They said that dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren’t careful bits of you could rot and drop off. (RM)
Inexplicable phenomena were not in themselves unusual on the Discworld. Rains of fish, for example, were so common in the little landlocked village of Pine Dressers that it had a flourishing smoking, canning and kipper-filleting industry. And in the mountain regions of Syrrit many sheep, left out in the fields all night, would be found in the morning to be facing the other way, without the apparent intervention of any human agency. (RM)
He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.
It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. (RM)
Everything that exists, yearns to live. That’s what the cycle of life is all about. That’s the engine that drives the great biological pumps of evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the very top – which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all that effort. (RM)
Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis, the most famous of course being: ‘Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!’, but others have included ‘Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork’, ‘I Fear I’m Going Back to Ankh-Morpork’, and the old favourite, ‘Ankh-Morpork Malady’. (RM)
Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small. (RM)
There were so many pieces of Mrs Cake's mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs Cake but, strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there seemed to be left. (RM)
The Archchancellor was not the kind of man who takes a special pleasure in being brusque and rude to women. Or, to put it another way, he was brusque and rude to absolutely everyone, regardless of sex, which was an equality of a sort. (RM)
Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can. (RM)
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter’s wheel. That’s how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn’t be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies. (RM)
‘Yeah, it’s always the same,’ said Reg Shoe bitterly. ‘Once you’re dead, people just don’t want to know, right? They act as if you’ve got some horrible disease. Dying can happen to anyone, right?’ (RM)
It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny. (RM)
Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason. (RM)
Carmen Miranda could have worn that hat to the funeral of a continent. Mrs Cake travelled underneath it as the basket travels under a balloon. (RM)
‘Why does everyone run towards a blood-curdling scream?’ mumbled the Senior Wrangler. ‘It’s contrary to all sense.’ (RM)
‘It can’t be intelligent, can it?’ said the Bursar.
‘All it’s doing is moving around slowly and eating things,’ said the Dean.
‘Put a pointy hat on it and it’d be a faculty member,’ said the Archchancellor. (RM)
Arguing over petty details at times of dimensional emergency was a familiar wizardly trait. (RM)
People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory. (RM)
I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND. (RM)
The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother. (RM)
‘Have you got any last words? YES. I DON’T WANT TO GO.
‘Well. Succinct, anyway.’ (RM)
Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn’t mean stupid. It just meant that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges. (RM)
Tell me,’ Ludmilla whispered to Ridcully, ‘is this how wizards usually behave?’ ‘The Senior Wrangler is an amazingly fine example,’ said Ridcully. ‘Got the same urgent grasp of reality as a cardboard cut-out. Proud to have him on the team.’ (RM)
‘Oook.’
‘You? We can’t take you,’ said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. ‘You don’t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.’
‘Oook!’ said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean. (RM)
Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off any more clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No spectres haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids.
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do. (RM)
‘What’s the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can’t blow something up?’ (RM)
When she’d heard that her daughter had been invited to the University she’d come too. Mrs Cake always assumed that an invitation to Ludmilla was an invitation to Ludmilla’s mother as well. Mothers like her exist everywhere, and apparently nothing can be done about them. (RM)
In the Ramtops village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. (RM)
There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts. (RM)
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (RM)
LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN? (RM)
... Sergeant Colon did know the meaning of the word "irony". He thought it meant "sort of like iron". (RM)
'... humans are human.'
AND SIXPENCE IS SIXPENCE. BUT CORN IS NOT JUST CORN. (RM)
Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and the very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.
Somewhere, the tiny voice of Bill Door said: from the point of view of the owner, longer ones are best. (RM)
