He stifled the urge to look around. Korodore has schooled him unmercifully in assassination drill. Know who was your assassin was small reward for being assassinated. Korodore said, ‘The price of curiosity is a terminal experience.’ (DSS)
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There was considerable satisfaction in a clean kill. What there wasn't supposed to be was pleasure in a messy one. (H)
Assassins were never employed. They were engaged, or retained or commissioned, but never employed. Only servants were employed. (H)
Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those cuts who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razorblades from the candyfloss of life. (H)
Assassination was meat and drink to the Hunghung court; in fact, meat and drink were often the means. (IT)
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)
… she was too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female profession generally available. (LF)
'Sit down, will you? Assassin’s are always late. ‘cos of style, right?’
‘This one’s mental.’ ‘Eccentric.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘A bag of cash.' (H) In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practiced the ultimate democracy. You didn’t need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people. (H)
Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they begin to take the view that injustice has its good points. (P)
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) ... while assassination was probably worse than debate it was better than war, which some people tended to think of as the same thing only louder. (P)
However efficient a ruler may be, there is always someone, isn’t there, who feels that his diet might be improved by some artificial additive, such as arsenic. (NOC)
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, which just goes to show they’re as confused about anatomy as they gen’rally are about everything else, unless they’re talking about instructions on how to stab him, in which case a better way is up and under the ribcage. (NOC)
The Hashishim, who derived their name from the vast quantities of hashish they consumed, were unique among vicious killers in being both deadly and, at the same time, inclined to giggle, groove to interesting patterns of light and shade on their terrible knife blades and, in extreme cases, fall over. (S)
It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive, you could get death for free. (P)
Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day. (TT)
‘We do not execute. We do not massacre. We never, you may be very certain, we never torture. We have no truck with crimes of passion or hatred or pointless gain. We do not do it for a delight in inhumation, or to feed some secret inner need, or for petty advantage, or for some cause or belief; I tell you, gentlemen, that all these reasons are in the highest degree suspect. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil’s scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.
‘No, we do it for the money. ‘And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money. ‘There can be few cleaner motives, so shorn of pretence. ‘Nil mortifi, sinelucre. Remember. No killing without payment.' (P) All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed. (P)
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