Witches would prefer to cut enemies dead with a look. There was no sense in killing your enemy. How would she know you’d won? (W)
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She wasn’t crying, which is not the same as, well, not crying. People walked around not crying all the time and didn’t think about it at all. But now, she did. She thought: I’m not crying. (W)
'I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It’s never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting “Forward, brave comrades!” you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!' (IT)
In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. (WS)
What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve that? (FC)
Spiked iron balls, broadswords and large heavy sticks with nails in were generally considered pretty fearsome weapons,
but they were nothing at all compared to twenty years suddenly applied with considerable force to the back of the head. (S) What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far
less messy, considerably more efficient and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden. (MM) 'Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their
life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.* *A policy adopted by almost all managers and several notable gods. (IT) There were some things on which even they were united. No more policy statements, no more consultative documents, no more morale-boosting messages to all staff. This was Hell, but you had to draw the line somewhere. (E)
... being turned in to something small and sticky often offends. (W)
The Patrician was not a man you shook a finger at unless you wanted to end up being able to count only to nine. (GG)
The Patrician didn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.*
*While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course. (GG) '... I think there’s no rule to stop me beating seven kinds of crap out of you until you tell me why you came here and when the rest of your mates are going to arrive. And that may take me some time, sir, because up until now I’ve only ever discovered five types of crap.' (MR)
No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you. Someone had to be the butt of the world. (MA)
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. (GO)
'... being a short dog in deep snow is not good for the ol’ wossnames ..' (FE)
Fun. What is it good for?
It’s not pleasure, joy, delight, enjoyment or glee. It’s a hollow, cruel, vicious little bastard, a word for something sought with an hilarious couple of wobbly antennae on your head and the words‘I want It!’ on your shirt, and it tends to leave you waking up with your face stuck to the street. (Th) ‘…I believe nougat is a terrible thing to cover with chocolate, where it can ambush the unsuspecting.’ (TOT)
There is suc a thing as an edible, nay delicious, meat pie floater, its mushy peas of just the right consistency, its tomato sauce piquant in its cheekiness, its pie filling tending even towards named parts of the animal. There are platonic burgers made of beef instead of cow lips and hooves. There are fish ‘n’ chips where the fish is more than just a white goo lurking at the bottom of a batter casing and you can’t use the chips to shave with. There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don’t apply mustard because that
would spoil the taste.It’s just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort, and seek it out. It’s as if Machiavelli had written a cookery book. Even so, there is no excuse for putting pineapple on pizza. (LC) Any seasoned traveller soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a‘regional speciality’, because all the term means is that dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than eat it. (LC)
'I'll always remember the taste of Mr Dibbler's sausages.'
‘People do.’ ‘A once-in-a-lifetime experience.’ ‘Frequently.’ (IT) And Sergeant Colon once again knew a secret about bravery. It was arguable a kind of enhanced cowardice – the knowledge that while death may await you if you advance it will be a picnic compared to the certain living hell that awaits should you retreat. (J)
I thought I’d show everyone what I’m made of. And now they’ll probably find out: I’m made of lots of tubes and greeny purple wobbly bits. (LL)
It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting. (S)
... he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and they devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. (GO) |
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