.... kingship was a bit like a grand piano - you could put a cover over it, but you could still see what shape it was underneath. (FE)
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'People like to see a bit of bellowing in a king. The odd belch is always popular too. Even a bit of carousing'd help if he could manage it. You know, quaffing and such.' (CJ)
'I'm going to have a word with young Verence,' said Nanny.
'He is the king, Nanny,' said Agnes. 'That's no reason for him to go around acting like he was royalty.' (CJ) 'When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment.' (CP)
... she lived in hope, and prepared her granddaughter for a royal life by seeing to it, whenever possible, that Ermintrude was not taught anything that could possibly be of any practical use whatsoever. (N)
The city of Genua had run out of royalty, inbreeding having progressed to the point where the sole remaining example consisted mostly of teeth ... (J)
Royalty, when they marry, either get very small things, like exquisitely-constructed clockwork eggs, or large bulky items, like duchesses. (LL)
He had formed the unusual opinion that the job of a king is to make the kingdom a better place for everyone to live in. (LL)
… it wasn’t the wearing of the hats that counted so much as having one to wear. Every trade, every craft had its hat. That’s why kings had hats. Take the crown off a king and all you had was someone good at having a weak chin and waving to people. Hats had power. Hats were important. (WA)
Windsor Castle seemed to Luis from without an intimidating pile, an excrescence of centuries of wealth heaped upon a core of medieval brutality. (LU)
'I should have thought you'd be all for kings.'
'Some of them were fearful oiks, you know,' she said airily. 'Wives all over the place, and chopping people's heads off, fighting pointless wars, eating with their knife, chucking half-eaten chicken legs over their shoulders, that sort of thing. Not our sort of people at all.' (GG) Flourishing, of course, was important. It didn't have much to do with wielding. Wielding a sword, the Supreme Grand Master considered, was simply the messy business of dynastic surgery. It was just a matter of cut and thrust. Whereas a King had to flourish one. It had to catch the light in just the right way, leaving watchers in no doubt that here was Destiny's chosen. (GG)
… when you’re a pharaoh, you get a very high class of obscure dream. (P)
‘… the thing with crowns is, it isn’t the putting them on that’s the problem, it’s the taking them off.’ (WS)
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) That was the trouble with royalty. However decent they were, and understanding, they were also likely to think that such things as security arrangements were for other people. (RS)
'... although it's vexing to remember it, I am the King of my enemies as well as my friends. There's a certain noblesse oblige, see. It's a bad king who kills his subjects. I would rather see them humiliated than dead.' (RS)
If you are a king your daughter will be beautiful. People have tried all kinds of aids to beauty, like washing in the morning dew, shoving yoghurt on their faces, etc, but for my money the best way to be beautiful is to have a dad with a lot of money and a bunch of armed men. It’s just amazin’ how people will spontaneously see what a beautiful princess you are in those circumstances. (NOC)
He'd heard rumors - who hadn’t? - that working in the Watch was the rightful king of Ankh-Morpork. He’d have to admit that, if you wanted to hide a secret heir to the throne, you couldn’t possibly hide him more carefully than under the face of C.W. St.J. Nobbs. (FC)
Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be. (SG)
Hodgesaargh didn’t much mind who ran the castle. For hundreds of years the falconers had simply got on with the important things, like falconry, which needed a lot of training, and left the kinging to amateurs. (CJ)
... Verence being a king, was allowed a gyrfalcon, whatever the hell that was, any earls in the vicinity could fly a peregrine, and priests were allowed sparrowhawks. Commoners were just about allowed a stick to throw*.
Magrat found herself wondering what Nanny Ogg would be allowed – a small chicken on a spring probably. There was no specific falcon for a witch but, as a queen, the Lancre rules of falconry allowed her to fly the wowhawk or Lappet-faced Worrier. It was small and shortsighted and preferred to walk everywhere. It fainted at the sight of blood. And about twenty wowhawks could kill a pigeon, if it was a sick pigeon. She’d spent an hour with one on her wrist. It had wheezed at her, and eventually it had dozed off upside down. *If it wasn’t a big stick. (LL) Always remember that the crowd which applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. (GP)
Verence was technically an absolute ruler and would continue to be so provided he didn’t make the mistake of repeatedly asking Lancrestrians to do anything they didn’t want to do. (CJ)
The people of Lancre wouldn’t dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They’d done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they’d also found that it didn’t do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he’d be certain to want something different and so they’d have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practice the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the ploughing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them. (CJ)
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