"I could see you were a cultured person," said the sword, "seldom do I get to meet really interesting people. For any length of time, anyway."


"Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects."
"precisely," said a passing bush.


"What is your name, barbarian?"
"Who are you calling a barbarian?"
"That is what I want to know."


"You keep saying you're dead..."
"Well?"
"Well, the dead, er, they, you know, don't talk much. As a rule..."


Twoflower drew himself up to his full height, an easy task.


"That's pretty uneven odds, isn't it?"
"Yah. I outnumber you one to two."


"It is forbidden to fight on the Killing Ground,"


"My Lord... what is death like?" called the old man tremulously.
"When I have investigated it fully, I will let you know."


They were running out of world.


Something else that was large and fortunately unidentifiable howled in the mist.


The captain was much travelled and had seen many strange peoples and curious things, many of which he had subsequently enslaved or stolen.


He had begun his career as a sailor on the Dehydrated Ocean in the heart of the disc's driest desert.


Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.


The wine was reputed to give certain drinkers an insight into the future which was, from the nut's point of view, the past.


At this point he spoke, in a friendly way, on the futility of force, the impossibility of escaping from the island and the high merit of muteness in comparison to, for example, death.


"It makes me feel... well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course."


It dawned on him - very slowly, because it was a completely new sensation - that someone in the world was frightened of him. The complete reverse was so often the case that he had come to think of it as a kind of natural law.


"I hope you're not proposing to enslave us,"
"Certainly not! Whatever could have given you that idea? Your lives in Krull will be rich, full and comfortable..."
"Oh, good,"
"-just not very long."


As suddenly as it had appeared, the magical tornado vanished. And there, occupying the space where the frog had been, was a frog.


"The sea is full of monsters. It is one of its prime attributes."


Six months ago Rincewind was a perfectly ordinary failed wizard. Then he met Twoflower, was employed at an outrageous salary as his guide, and has spent most of the intervening time being shot at, terrorised, chased and hanging from high places with no hope of salvation or, as is now the case, dropping from high places.


The walls were covered with occult symbols, and most of the floor was taken up by the Eightfold Seal of Stasis, generally agreed in magical circles to have all the stopping power of a well-aimed half brick.


It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.


Metal clasps held it shut. They weren't decorated, they were just very heavy - like the chain, which didn't so much attach the book to the lectern as tether it. They looked like the work of someone who had a pretty definite aim in mind, and who had spent most of his life making training harness for elephants.


Loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.


Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb "The pen is mightier than the sword," and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase "only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp."


Rincewind had been generally reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers.


Twoflower was quite certain that in a well-organised society people would not be allowed to go around getting drowned.


There was no sound but the murmur of nasty little stinging insects, the occasional crack of a falling branch, and the whispering of the trees discussing religion and the trouble with squirrels.


"Oh. Do you think there's anything to eat in this forest?"
"Yes," said the wizard bitterly, "us."


"Have a bit more table,"
"No thanks, I don't like marzipan," said Twoflower. "Anyway, I'm sure it's not right to eat other people's furniture."


"Rocks don't fly. They're noted for not doing it."
"Maybe they would if they could," said Twoflower. 'Perhaps this one just found out how."
"Let's just hope it doesn't forget again," 


Like druids everywhere, they believed in the essential unity of all life, the healing power of plants, the natural rhythm of the seasons and the burning alive of anyone who didn't approach all this in the right frame of mind.


Some druids suggested that there were certain flaws in this theory, but senior druids explained very pointedly that there was indeed room for informed argument, the cut and thrust of exciting scientific debate, and it lay on top of the next solstice bonfire.


"Nice? A triumph of the silicon chunk, a miracle of modern masonic technology - nice?"
"Oh, yes," said Twoflower, to whom sarcasm was merely a seven letter word beginning with S.


...and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically.


"Friend of yoursh?"
"We've got this sort of hate-hate relationship, yes."


In a distant forest a wolf howled, felt embarrassed when no-one joined in, and stopped.


Horse People had a lot to learn about air conditioning, starting with what it meant.


"You did look a bit white. Like someone had walked over your grave."
"Uh, yes, it was probably me."


"Oh, er, well," said Twoflower. Your teeth, you see...'
"What about them?"
"Well, I can't help noticing that they're, um, not in the same geographical location as your mouth."


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.


"What are you looking at? He can go back if he wants, why should I bother?"
The Luggage said nothing.
"Look, he's not my responsibility. Let's be absolutely clear about that."
The Luggage said nothing, but louder this time.


Rincewind wasn't much of a wizard and even less of a fighter, but he was an expert at cowardice and he knew fear when he smelt it.


"The Necrotelecomnicon," said the dwarf. "Wizards use it. It's how to contact the dead, I think."


"She's not bad. She's going to marry a friend of ours.'
"Does he know?"


"That doesn't make sense, or if it makes sense, I don't like it."


"Oh. But you are?" said Rincewind, as politely as possible while grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue.


"And what would humans be without love?"
RARE, said Death.


Books of magic have a sort of life of their own. Some have altogether too much; for example, the first edition of the Necrotelicomicon has to be kept between iron plates, the True Arte of Levitatione has spent the last one hundred and fifty years up in the rafters, and Ge Fordge's Compenydyum of Sex Majick is kept in a vat of ice in a room all by itself and there's a strict rule that it can only be read by wizards who are over eighty and, if possible, dead.


Against one shadowy wall was a wardrobe. It was an ancient oak affair, dark as night, in whose dusty depths coat-hangers lurked and bred; herds of flaking shoes roamed its floor.


Rincewind decided that if a few quiet beers wouldn't allow him to see things in a different light, then a few more probably would. It was certainly worth a try.


The Archchancellor's chair was empty. Wayzygoose was dining alone in his study, as befits a man chosen by the gods after their serious discussion with sensible senior wizards earlier in the day. Despite his eighty years, he was feeling a little bit nervous and hardly touched his second chicken.


In some parts of the city curiosity didn't just kill the cat, it threw it in the river with lead weights tied to its feet.


One of Rincewind's tutors had said of him that "To call his understanding of magical theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice."


The vermine is a small black and white relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions. Its skin is rare and highly valued, especially by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it.


The thief, as will become apparent, was a special type of thief. This thief was an artist of theft. Other thieves merely stole everything that was not nailed down, but this thief stole the nails as well.


"Quick, you must come with me! You're in great danger!"
"Why?"
"Because I will kill you if you don't."


"Why are they chasing you?"
"I don't know."
"Oh, come on! There must be a reason!"
"Oh, there's plenty of reasons. I just don't know which one. Are you coming?"


"Down these mean streets a man must walk," he thought. "And along some of them he will break into a run."


"Take him to the dungeons!"
"We haven't got any dungeons. This is a university."
"Then take him to the wine cellars," snapped Carding. "And while you're down there, build some dungeons."


"Lay a finger on me, and you'll make me wish you hadn't. I warn you."


It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired.


"Today the city, tomorrow the world," said someone at the back of the crowd.
Carding nodded.
"Tomorrow the world, and--he calculated quickly--on Friday the universe!"
That leaves the weekend free, thought Spelter.


In the Plaza of Broken Moons, once the boutique of mysterious pleasures from whose flare-lit and curtain-hung stalls the late-night reveller could obtain anything from a plate of jellied eels to the venereal disease of his choice, the mists coiled and dripped into chilly emptiness.


Nothing moved except the shimmering air, hot as a stolen volcano


"Die," suggested Abrim.


"...like those ... what do you call those things you find at the bottom of rivers?"
"Frogs."
"Stones."
"Unsuccessful gangsters."


The interior of the tower smelled of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings.


it's the original stuff, from right back in the dawn of time. Or around breakfast, at any rate.'


"Do not put down the lamp, because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity."


Rincewind's mind was operating at the speed of continental drift.


"Are you alive? If you're not, I'd prefer it if you didn't answer."


A few brave souls turned their attention to the wreckage, on the basis that there might be survivors who could be rescued or looted or both.


"What's the good of killing a troll? What've you got when you've killed a troll?"
"A dead troll. That's the point."


Rincewind's gaze swept across the floor. It was obvious that it was the only sweeping the 
floor had had for some time.


...and this explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight.


Astfgl, the new King of the Demons, was furious. Not simply because the air-conditioning had broken down again, not because he felt surrounded by idiots and plotters on every side, and not even because no-one could pronounce his name properly yet, but also because he had just been given bad news. The demon who had been chosen by lottery to deliver it cowered in front of his throne with its tail between its legs. It was immortally afraid that something wonderful was soon to happen to it*. (*Demons have a distorted sense of values.)


This week's special offer, one free satellite with every world dominated.


I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I'll still be.


He could shout 'help!' in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve.


"The Tezuman priests have a sophisticated calendar and an advanced horology," quoted Rincewind.
"Ah, good."
"No. It means time measurement."


"There's a door..."
"Where does it go?"
"It stays where it is, I think."


You see, sir, what it is, he likes to get it over with without anyone getting hurt, sir, especially him.


This isn't Ankh. I can tell by the little details, like the flickering red shadows and the distant screaming. In Ankh the screaming is usually much closer.


"Um," said Rincewind. He didn't like the sound of Him being back and Him being angry. Whenever something important enough to deserve capital letters was angry in the vicinity of Rincewind, it was usually angry with him.


It may have occurred to him that the journey was taking some time, but that was Time's problem.


...they poisoned all their priests and tried enlightened atheism instead, which still meant they could kill as many people as they liked but didn't have to get up so early to do it.


Now their long war was over and they could get on with the proper concern of civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.


Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.


And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.


"The Empire?' squeaked the Dean. "Me? But they hate foreigners!"
"So do you. You should get on famously."


Rincewind the shoemaker? Rincewind the beggar? Rincewind the thief? Just about everything apart from Rincewind the corpse demanded training or aptitudes that he didn't have.


He was hungry, and he had no money.
He chided himself for this kind of negative thinking. That was not the right approach. What he should do was go in and order a large, nourishing meal. Then instead of being hungry with no money he'd be well fed with no money, a net gain on his current position.


Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.


"It is possible sometimes for money to legitimately belong to other people," said Mr Saveloy patiently.


They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn't steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.


"Oh . . . and Bacon Surprise."
REALLY? WHAT IS SO SURPRISING ABOUT BACON?
"I don't know. I suppose it comes as something of a shock to the pig."


He'd always taken pains, usually those of other people, to fill life with certainties.


"Metal poisoning."
"How?"
"Three swords through the stomach."


"Presumed dead in Skund."
"Presumed?"
"Well, they only found his head."


A good general always knows when to leave the battlefield, and as far as Lord Fang was concerned, it was when he saw the enemy coming towards him.


The Emperor said he's well in favour of education provided no-one makes him have one.


"I thought Lord Hong didn't believe in ghosts."
HE MAY DO SO NOW. A LOT OF GHOSTS BELIEVE IN LORD HONG.


Things are buried for a reason, they considered. There's no point in wondering what it was. Don't go digging things up in case they won't let you bury them again.


Senior wizards always distrusted a young man who was going places since traditionally his route might be via your jugular.


"What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the Library?"
"Students,"


Rincewind tried to seem harmless. It required little in the way of acting.


The only curses of his that stood a chance of working were on the lines of 'May you get rained on at some time in your life,' and 'May you lose some small item despite the fact that you put it there only a moment ago.'


And they weren't exactly sheep. They looked more like, well . . . human sheep. Sticking-out ears, white curls, a definite sheepish look, but standing upright, with hands. And he was pretty sure that there was no way you could get a cross between a human and a sheep. If there was, people would definitely have found out by now, especially in the more isolated rural districts.


It moved in a stolid, I-can-do-this-all-day manner that clearly said the only way you get me to go faster will be to push me off a cliff.


Wizards, when faced with danger, would immediately stop and argue amongst themselves about exactly what kind of danger it was. By the time everyone in the party understood, either it had become the sort of danger where your options are so very, very clear that you instantly take one of them or die, or it had got bored and gone away. Even danger has its pride.


"Could you get treatment for premature incineration?"


"I used to make snakes out of clay when I was a little boy," said the Bursar happily.
"Well done, Bursar."
"Doing the feet was the hard part."


"Gonna hang you by the neck until you're dead, mate. Tomorrow morno."
"You couldn't perhaps just hang me by the neck until I'm sorry?"
"No, mate. Got to be dead."


Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'.


"In that case," said the Dean, "I move that we abandon ship."
"What for?" said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. "The sharks?"
"That is a secondary problem,"
"That's right," said Ponder, "we can always vote to abandon shark."


"We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?"
"Why?"
"It saves time."


People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.


The reason for the story was a mix of many things. There was humanity's desire to do forbidden deeds merely because they were forbidden. There was its desire to find new horizons and kill the people who live beyond them. There were the mysterious scrolls. There was the cucumber. But mostly there was the knowledge that one day, quite soon, it would be all over.


"Ah, well, life goes on," people say when someone dies. But from the point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn't. It's the universe that goes on. Just as the deceased was getting the hang of everything, it's all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the imponderables of life, in the face of which people either start to pray... or become really, really angry.


The wizards, once they understood the urgency of a problem, and then had lunch, and argued about the pudding, could actually work quite fast.


Archchancellor Ridcully was technically the head of All Known Wizardry. That is, all those wizards who knew Archchancellor Ridcully, and were prepared to be led.


Another response of the wizards, when faced with a new and unique situation, was to look through their libraries to see if it had ever happened before. This was, Lord Vetinari reflected, a good survival trait. It meant that in times of danger you spent the day sitting very quietly in a building with very thick walls.


Lord Vetinari, despite his education, had a mind like an engineer. If you wished to open something, you found the appropriate spot and applied the minimum amount of force necessary to achieve your end. Possibly the spot was between a couple of ribs and the force was applied via a dagger, or between two warring countries and applied via an army, but the important thing was to find that one weak spot which would be the key to everything.


Many of the things built by the architect and freelance designer Bergholt Stuttley ("Bloody Stupid") Johnson were recorded in Ankh-Morpork, often on the line where it says "Cause of Death".


The minstrel's thoughts ran like this: These men are rubies insane. They are rubies sure to kill me. Rubies. They've dragged me rubies all the rubies rubies.


"Oh, Mighty One," he began, always a safe beginning and the religious equivalent of "To Whom It May Concern", "I have to warn you that a bunch of heroes are climbing the mountain to destroy you with returned fire. May you strike them down with wrathful lightning and then look favourably upon thy servant, i.e. Evil Harry Dread. Mail may be left with Mrs. Gibbons, 12 Dolmen View, Pant-y-Girdl, Llamedos. Also if possible I should like a location with real lava pits, every other evil lord manages to get a dread lava pit even when they are on one hundred feet of bloody alluvial soil, excuse my Klatchian, this is further discrimination against the small trader, no offence meant."


What happens if you don't open the right valves in sequence is that you will wish you had opened the right valves in sequence.


"And are you omnipotent?"
"Aye, lass, but there's pills I'm takin' f'r it!"


Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.


"A number of humans have entered Dunmanifestin in the past and returned alive."
"Returned alive per se is not hugely comforting. With their arms and legs? Sanity? All minor extremities?"
"Mostly they were mythical characters."
"Before or after?"


"Outstanding! It's just a walk in the park!"
"You mean people are going to mug us and steal all our money and kick us viciously in the ribs?


ONCE UPON A TIME, there was Discworld. There still is an adequate supply.


The Ramtops are full of deep valleys and unexpected crags and considerably more geography than they know what to do with.


It was also acutely embarrassing to Mort's family that the youngest son was not at all serious and had about the same talent for horticulture that you would find in a dead starfish.


"His heart's in the right place, mind," said Lezek, carefully.
"Ah. 'Course, 'tis the rest of him that isn't."


After five minutes Mort came out of the tailors wearing a loose fitting brown garment of imprecise function, which had been understandably unclaimed by a previous owner and had plenty of room for him to grow, on the assumption that he would grow into a nineteen-legged elephant.


IT'D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN'T IT?


The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. 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.


There seemed to be rather a lot of friendly young ladies who couldn't afford many clothes.


"Well, ---- me! A ----ing wizard. I hate ----ing wizards!"
"You shouldn't ---- them, then," muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.


He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.


After some game attempts to get on with drowning, he was eventually bullied back into what passed for his life.


Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.


Under its bath of alcohol his brain kept trying to attract his attention.


"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever... Have you thought of going into teaching?"


There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. It was just an older one.


LIFE'S A HABIT THAT'S HARD TO GIVE UP. ONE PUFF OF BREATH IS NEVER ENOUGH. YOU'LL FIND YOU WANT TO TAKE ANOTHER.


Under Things to Do, a crabbed hand had written: Die.


Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever, changed his mind about anything. The other was that 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.


"Can you keep it down?" he demanded. "There's people down here trying to be dead!"


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"They buried you alive just because you were dead!"


"But he's dead, isn't he? He said he was."


No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.


Windle wasn't really listening. "I've met people I never even knew existed. I've done all sorts of things. I've really got to know who Windle Poons is." 
WHO IS HE, THEN?
"Windle Poons." 
I CAN SEE WHERE THAT MUST HAVE COME AS A SHOCK. 
"Well, yes." 
ALL THESE YEARS AND YOU NEVER SUSPECTED.


Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out


"For Your Comfort And Convenience YOU WILL NOT SMOKE."


It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.


The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.


Musicians were often short of money; it was one definition of a musician.


Guitars were supposed to be shaped like a woman, but this was only the case if you thought women had no legs, a long neck and too many ears.


"You don't get craftsmanship like that these days."
"Only because we've learned from experience!"


The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly.


"I don't believe there's a Death of Rats in a cowl carrying a scythe."
"He's standing in front of you."
"That's no reason to believe it."
"I can see you've certainly had a [i]proper[/i] education," said the raven sourly.


"I don't want exposure in de Drum. Exposure's the last thing I want in de Drum. In de Drum, I want something to hide behind."


There was a brass plate screwed on the wall beside the door. It said: "C V Cheesewaller, DM (Unseen) B. Thau, B.F." It was the first time Susan had ever heard metal speak.


"You think candles get dribbly like that by themselves? That's three days' work for a skilled candle dribbler."


If someone had told Susan that Death had a house, she would have called them mad or, even worse, stupid. But if she'd had to imagine one, she'd have drawn, in sensible black crayon, some towering, battlemented, Gothic mansion. It would loom, and involve other words ending in 'oom', like gloom and doom.


The Mended Drum had traditionally gone in for, well, traditional pub games, such as dominoes, darts and Stabbing People In The Back And Taking All Their Money. The new owner had decided to go up-market. This was the only available direction.


I... think I understand you, I just don't know what you're saying...


She was as much woman as you could get in one place without getting two women.


Up until that time the D'regs, a collection of cheerfully warlike nomadic tribes, had roamed the desert quite freely. Now there was a line, they were sometimes Klatchian D'regs and sometimes Hershebian D'regs, with all the rights due to citizens of both states,
particularly the right to pay just as much tax as could be squeezed out of them and be drafted in to fight wars against people they'd never heard of.


D'regs were at war with everyone, including one another, and having considerable fun because the D'reg word for 'stranger' was the same as for 'target'.


The tradition of promotion in the University by filling dead men's shoes, sometimes by firstly ensuring the death of the man in those shoes, had lately ceased.


"I was on stage and I thought someone was watching me."
"Really? That's really occult, that is..."


It had been an uneventful night. About an hour earlier a 64 foot organ pipe had dropped out of the sky. Seargent Detritus had wandered over to inspect the crater, but he wasn't quite certain if this was criminal activity. Besides, for all he knew this was how you got organ pipes.


Susan's parents had assumed that insulating her from the fluffy edges of the world was the safest thing to do. In the circumstances, this was like not telling people about self-defence so that no-one would ever attack them.


The Bursar in any normal society would have been considered more unglued than a used stamp in a downpour.


The Archchancellor, who regularly used the long gallery above the Great Hall for archery practice and had accidentally shot the Bursar twice, thought the whole faculty was as crazy as loons, whatever a loon was. "Not enough fresh air," he'd say. "Too much sittin' around indoors. Rots the brain" More often he'd say, "Duck!"


The big volume open in front of him contained some of the collected drawings of Leonard of Quirm, skilled artist and certified genius with a mind that wandered so much it came back with souvenirs.


Blert Wheedown's Guitar Primer
Play your Way to Succefs in Three Easy Lefsons and Eighteen Hard Lefsons!


Her mother's favourite dish had been Genocide by Chocolate.


"In my experience, what every true artist wants--really wants--is to be paid."
"And be famous."
"Famous I don't know about. It's hard to be famous and alive."


Ridcully believed that everything had come into being by chance or, in the particular case of the Dean, out of spite.


"Ah, we certainly know what goes into good beer in AnkhMorpork."
The wizards nodded. They certainly did. That's why they were drinking gin and tonic.


The next table was occupied by Satchelmouth Lemon, one of the Musicians' Guild's recruiting officers, with a couple of associates whose apparent knowledge of music extended only to the amount of percussion available on the human skull.


His determined expression suggested that he was not there for his health, although the fact that the Guild officers had a mean look about them rather hinted he was there for other people's health, mostly in order to take it away.


"Have you been taking dried frog pills, old chap?"
"Of course not, they're for the mentally unstable!"
"Ah. There's the trouble, then."


The kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes.


People are supposed to look up to you and that's not because you're somersaulting over their heads, Runes.


He felt like a lifelong tundra dweller when he wakes up one morning with a deep urge to go water-skiing.


"Won't the landlord object?"
"Of course he'll object. That's what landlords are [i]for[/i]."


The room looked like an alchemist's laboratory had suffered the inevitable explosion and landed in a blacksmith's shop.


"Anyone else been working in here?"
"Well... there's me, and Tez the Terrible and Skazz and Big Mad Drongo, I think..."
"What are they?" said Ridcully. And then, from the depths of memory, a horrible answer suggested itself. Only a very specific species had names like that.
"Students?"


"I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll throw in the space between the strings for free, OK?"


"This is what you boys use magic for, is it? Looking at sound? Hey, we've got some nice cheese in the kitchen, how about we go and listen to how it smells."


He had the most interesting haircut Ridcully had ever seen, since it consisted of a shoulder length fringe of hair all round. It was only the tip of his nose poking out which told the world which way he was facing.


Chrysoprase had been a very quick learner when he arrived in Ankh-Morpork. He began with an important lesson: hitting people was thuggery. Paying other people to do the hitting on your behalf was good business.


"One of my guitar strings has broke."
"Well, you've got five more, ain't you?"
"Yur. But I doesn't know how to play them, like."
"You didn't know how to play six, right? So now you're a bit less ignorant."


The money's not important? You keep on saying that! What kind of musician [i]are[/i] you?'


"I'd have you lot up in front of the University authorities first thing in the morning, if it wasn't for the fact that you are the University authorities..."


Wizards were rumoured to be wise - in fact, that's where the word came from*.

*From the Old [i]wys-ars[/i], lit.: one who, at bottom, is very smart.


I HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO GET DRUNK.
The barman looked at the rows and rows of glasses. There were wine-glasses. There were cocktail glasses. There were beer mugs. There were steins in the shape of jolly fat men. There was a bucket.
"I think you're on the right lines," he hazarded.


The success of Dibbler's commercial strategy hinged on him being able to find customers, not the other way around.


"The country... yes. Dangerous place, the country."
"Right," said Satchelmouth. "There's turnips, for a start."


Expecting Dibbler not to think about anything concerning money was like expecting rocks not to think about gravity.


Old shoes always turn up in the bottom of every wardrobe. If a mermaid had a wardrobe old shoes would turn up in the bottom of it.


"How long were you asleep?"
"Same as I am awake," said Cliff.


The Archchancellor's staff was a particularly good one, six feet long and quite magical. Not that he used magic very much. In his experience, anything that couldn't be disposed of with a couple of whacks from six feet of oak was probably immune to magic as well.


There was no such thing as a whisper in Ankh-Morpork when the sum involved had the word 'thousand' in it somewhere; people could hear you [i]think[/i] that kind of money in Ankh-Morpork.


"Keep together, will you?"
"I am together."
"For if we are united, what can possibly harm us?"
"Well, (1), a great big..."


With the exact minimum amount of effort they swung the huge gates together. It wasn't much of a precaution. The keys had been lost a long time ago. Even the sign 'Thank you for Nott Invading Our City' was barely readable now.


Susan didn't feel that she was floating. She was simply standing. The fact that it was on nothing was a minor point.

"And there's the sign saying 'Do not, under any circumstances, open this door'."
"Why d'yer think I want it opened?"
"Er... why?"
"To see why they wanted it shut, of course."
*This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.


Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those curs 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.


The members of the Guild of Assassins considered themselves cultured men who enjoyed good music and food and literature. And they knew the value of human life. To a penny, in many cases.


Anyone could buy the services of the Guild. Several zombies had, in the past, employed the Guild to settle scores with their murderers. In fact the Guild, he liked to think practised 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.


The problem was that the Guild took young boys and gave them a splendid education and incidentally taught them how to kill, cleanly and dispassionately, for money and for the good of society, or at least that part of society that had money, and what other kind of society was there?


Besides, it was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.


Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.


The previous governess had taught them a prayer which included the hope that some god or other would take their soul if they died while they were asleep and, if Susan was any judge, had the underlying message that this would be a good thing.


Peachy was not someone you generally asked questions of, except the sort that go like: If-if-if-if I give you all my money could you possibly not break the other leg, thank you so much?'


True, after a few minutes talking to him your eyes began to water and you felt you needed to scrub your skin even on the inside, but no one was perfect, were they?


Sometimes the things they moved were in fact people who were far too unimportant to trouble the Assassins' Guild with, but who were nevertheless inconveniently positioned where they were and could much better be located on, for example, a sea bed somewhere.


They had plenty of work. There was always something that needed transferring from A to B or, of course, to the bottom of the C.


Peachy's only contact with intelligence had been to beat it up and rob it whenever possible.


Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.


"Look, Death's Death. It's a full-time job right? It's not as though you can run, like, a window cleaning round on the side or nip round after work cutting people's lawns."


But someone ought to do something, and right now the whole pool of someones consisted of her, and no one else.


The late Bergholt Johnson was generally recognized as the worst inventor in the world, yet in a very specialized sense. Merely bad inventors made things that failed to operate. Any fool could make something that did nothing when you pressed the button. Everything he built worked. It just didn't do what it said on the box. If you wanted a small ground-to-air missile, you asked Johnson to design an ornamental fountain. It amounted to pretty much the same thing. But this never discouraged him, or the morbid curiosity of his clients.


Music, landscape gardening, architecture - there was no start to his talents.


Johnson's inventiveness didn't just push the edge of the envelope but often went across the room and out through the wall of the sorting office.


On Unix interfaces in general and [b]vi[/b] in particular:

"Oh, it's largely intuitive, Archchancellor," said Ponder. "Obviously you have to spend a lot of time learning it first, though."


It was the kind of uniform that would only be inconspicuous if you wore it in a nightclub for chameleons on hard drugs. 


The senior wizards gathered round, ready to help those less fortunate than themselves remain that way.


Then the Dean repeated the mantra that has had such a marked effect on the progress of knowledge throughout the ages.
"Why don't we just mix up absolutely everything and see what happens?" he said.
And Ridcully responded with the traditional response.
"It's got to be worth a try," he said.


"On the other hand," he said brightly, "if it's a kill-or-cure remedy then we are, given that the patient is practically immortal, probably on to a winner."


The path to wisdom does, in fact, begin with a single step. Where people go wrong is in ignoring all the thousands of other steps that come after it. They make the single step of deciding to become one with the universe, and for some reason forget to take the logical next step of living for seventy years on a mountain and a daily bowl of rice and yak-butter tea that would give it any kind of meaning.


Shortly afterwards there was some tinkling music and a very bright light and two rather affronted angels appeared at the other end of the alley, but Albert threw snowballs at them until they went away.


He knew that Hex thought about things by turning them into numbers and crunching them (a clothes wringer had been plumbed in for that purpose), but why did it need small religious pictures? And there was the mouse. It didn't do much, but whenever they forgot to give it cheese Hex stopped working.


Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identicallooking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sagosago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.


WHAT DO YOU CALL THAT WARM FEELING YOU GET INSIDE WHEN...
"Heartburn!"


"Hah, it's as silly as saying you could clothe the naked by, well, giving them some clothes."


This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts..."


It was one of those cocktails where each very sticky, very strong ingredient is poured in very slowly, so that they layer on top of one another. Drinks like this tend to get called Traffic Lights or Rainbow's Revenge or, in places where truth is more highly valued, Hello and Goodbye, Mr Brain Cell.


It's amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters.


It's not known why most of the space-going races of the universe want to undertake rummaging in Earthling underwear as a prelude to formal contact. But representatives of several hundred races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be abductees. Some have been in fad abducted while waiting to carry out an abduction on a couple of other aliens trying to abduct the aliens who were, as a result of misunderstood instructions, trying to form cattle into circles and mutilate crops.
The planet Earth is now banned to an alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they have actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one who is big, hairy and has very large feet.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.


"Sandals and togas and so on."
"Ah. Not noticeably socked?"
"Not excessively so, no."


Igor's weapon of choice was a little different. It was tipped with silver (for werewolves), hung with garlic (for vampires) and wrapped around with a strip of blanket (for bogeymen). For everyone else the fact that it was two feet of solid bog-oak usually sufficed.


He was not about to allow a bit of understanding to lighten his day.


"And there was blue sky but... she must have got this wrong ... it says here there was only blue sky above..."
"Yep. Best place for the sky. Sky underneath you, that probably means trouble."


PLEASE ENLIGHTEN ME. WHAT IS SO IMPORTANT ABOUT HAVING A POT TO PISS IN?
"It's a figure of speech. Means you're as poor as a church mouse."
ARE THEY POOR?
"Well... yeah."
BUT SURELY NOT MORE POOR THAN ANY OTHER MOUSE? AND, AFTER ALL, THERE TEND TO BE LOTS OF CANDLES AND THINGS THEY COULD EAT.


IT'S RIGHT to BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT. BUT YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE SOMETHING TO BE HAPPY ABOUT HAVING. THERE'S NO POINT IN BEING HAPPY ABOUT HAVING NOTHING.
"I suppose people'd say they've got the moon and the stars and suchlike."
I'M SURE THEY WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO PRODUCE THE PAPERWORK.


Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely - a busted cart here, a dead dog there - that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.


"Different types of pollen, different thicknesses of honey, placement of the eggs... It's actually amazing how much information you can store on one honeycomb. And it's very secure because anyone trying to tamper with it will get stung to death."


The wizards shuddered. They weren't against the outdoors, it was simply their place in it they objected to.


"Yes, sir. Botanically, it's a type of fish. According to my theory it's cladistically associated with the Krullian pipefish, sir, which of course is also yellow and goes around in bunches or shoals."
"And lives in trees?"
"Well, not usually, sir. The banana is obviously exploiting a new niche."


Medium Dave was a thief and a murderer and therefore had a highly developed moral sense.


"Don't worry. I'm on your side. A violent death is the last thing that'll happen to you."


"I'm sure he wouldn't continue eating them if they were addictive."


Ponder Stibbons fought his way through the throng. He knew his more senior fellows when they were feeling helpful. They were like a glass of water to a drowning man.


There was a lack of landscape in front of her.


YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.


"You need an athithtant. And when it cometh to athithtantth, you cannot go wrong with an Igor. Everyone knowth that"


"Most people call me Lu-Tze, lad. Or 'Sweeper'. Until they get to know me better, some call me 'Get out of the way'. I've never been very venerable, except in cases of bad spelling."


He is bald under the hair.


"It was a good challenge. A decent 'Ai!' and a very passable 'Hai-eee!', I thought. Good martial gibberish all round, such as you don't often hear these days."


A heavy young man in a grubby yellow robe was sitting on an upturned box a few feet away. He looked a bit like a monk, except for his hair, because his hair looked a bit like an entirely separate organism. To say that it was black and bound up in a ponytail is to miss the opportunity of using the term 'elephantine'. It was hair with personality.


"Why is it the opportunity of a lifetime, Mr Soto?"
"No, you misunderstand me. You, that is Newgate Ludd, are being offered, that is by me, the opportunity of having a lifetime. Which is more than you will have shortly."


"We're the most secret society that you can imagine."
"Huh? I've never heard of you!"
"See? That's how good we are."


If children were weapons, Jason would have been banned by international treaty. Jason had doting parents and an attention span of minus several seconds, except when it came to inventive cruelty to small furry animals, when he could be quite patient.

Jason kicked, punched, bit and spat. His artwork had even frightened the life out of Miss Smith, who could generally find something nice to say about any child. He was definitely a boy with special needs. In the view of the staff room, these began with an exorcism.


She gave Igor the willies, and he was a man not usually subject to even the smallest willy.


The lisp could be a problem, and in truth any Igor could easily fix it, but it was part of being an Igor. You might as well stop limping.


"Floating in the air doesn't make you a bad person."

Igor shrugged. He was entertaining the idea that it didn't mean you were a person at all.


Igors were loyal, but they were not stupid. A job was a job. When an employer had no further use for your services, for example because he'd just been staked through the heart by a crowd of angry villagers, it was time to move on before they decided that you ought to be on the next stake.


The Auditors avoided death by never going so far as to get a life.


"Do you have any idea what happens when a lot of big armed men try to attack a small, elderly, unarmed monk?"
"To the best of my knowledge," said the intellectual of the group, "he turns out to be a very unlucky monk."


The yeti was clapping. It had to be a slow handclap, because of the creature's long arms. But when the hands met, they'd come a long way and were glad to see one another. They echoed around the mountains.


Admittedly, Igor knew, that meant never ask BIG questions. 'Would thur like a cup of tea around now?' was fine, but 'What do you need a hundred virginth for?' or 'Where do you ecthpect me to find a brain at thith time of night?' was not.


An Igor stood for loyal, dependable, discreet service with a smile, or at least a sort of lopsided grin, or possibly just a curved scar in the right place.


That meant that she had something to hide. Of course, he had worked for masters who occasionally had a great deal to hide, sometimes in deep holes at midnight. But this situation was morally different.


Every society needs a battle cry, but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is "Remember-the-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-the-Atrocity-That-We're-About-to-Commit-Today! And So On! Hurrah!"


Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think 'Oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?'


'Three times, eh?' said Lobsang. 'That's a lot of times to go extinct. I mean, most species only manage it once, don't they?'


"It couldn't possibly have been murder because the balance of my mind was disturbed. Yes, 'cos I really, really wanted to kill him, right? And you can't tell me that's a normal frame of mind, right?"


I AM THE GRIM REAPER. I DO NOT THINK PEOPLE WISH ME TO GET... CREATIVE.


'It is a cat. It arrived. It does not appear to wish to depart.'


'That, lad, is a clock cuckoo. A young one, by the look of it, trying to build a nest that'll attract a mate. Not much chance of that... See? It's got the numerals all wrong and it's stuck the hands on crooked.'


"Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em."


Always put off until tomorrow something that, tomorrow, you could put off until, let's say, next year.


'And they have no sense of colour. They don't understand it. Look how he's dressed. Grey suit, grey shirt, grey shoes, grey cravat, grey everything.'
'Er... er... perhaps it was just someone trying to be very cool?'
'You think so? No loss there, then,'


'I do not understand why it is that I now perceive a desire to bring my hand in sharp contact with your face,' said Miss Brown.
'Exactly my point,' said Mr White. 'You do not understand it, and therefore it is dangerous. Perform the act, and we will know more.'


Human is a very popular look in these parts. You'd be amazed.


I could see we're in that area where the prince gets brought up as a swineherd until he manifests his destiny, but there's not that many swineherding jobs around these days, and poking hogs with a stick is not all it's cracked up to be, believe you me. So I said, well, I'd heard the Guilds down in the big cities took in foundlings out of charity, and looked after them well enough, and there's many well set-up men and women who started life that way. There's no shame in it, plus, if the destiny doesn't manifest as per schedule, he'd have set his hands to a good trade, which would be a consolation. Whereas swineherding 's just swineherding.


Susan was sensible. It was, she knew, a major character flaw. It did not make you popular, or cheerful, and - this seemed to her to be the most unfair bit - it didn't even make you right. But it did make you definite.


Koan 97: 'Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you.' Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certainly had worked. He'd always left aquatic mammals well alone, and they had done the same to him.


There was a discreet drain in the pavement in case people standing in front of the [shop] window drooled too much.


Nougat is a terrible thing to cover with chocolate, where it can ambush the unsuspecting.


She had to stop because the angel had wrenched the halo from its head and was dragging it down the fused edge of the pages.


She also knew what to do if you were sharing the same stretch of water with a hippopotamus, which was to find another stretch of water. Hippos only look big and cuddly from a distance. Close up, they just look big.


There were of course far more interesting and complex ways for a History Monk to avoid being noticed, but he'd adopted the begging bowl method ever since Lu-Tze had shown him that people never see anyone who wants them to give him money.


Questing fingers found a chocolate in the nest of empty paper cups, and told her that it was a damn nougat. But she was resolute. Life was tough. Sometimes you got nougat.


No-one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum.


Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that. 
It's happening already.


People have often speculated about what our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today. Would they approve of modern society, they ask, would they marvel at present-day achievements? And of course this misses a fundamental point. What would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: 'Why is it so dark in here?'


And the sun toiled across the sky. Many people have wondered why. Some people think a giant dung beetle pushes it. As explanations go it lacks a certain technical edge, and has the added drawback that, as certain circumstances may reveal, it is possibly correct.


It was a full-length mirror. 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.


Teppic stuck one leg over the sill and unhitched his line and grapnel. He hooked the gutter two floors up and slipped out of the window. 

No assassin ever used the stairs.


Of course, any attempt, any overt move which missed would attract immediate failure and loss of privileges[2].

[2] Breathing, for a start.


Vyrt always had plenty of money, and used to turn up at the palace with expensive gifts, exotic suntans and thrilling tales of the interesting people he'd met in foreign parts, in most cases quite briefly.


He'd always remember the first night in the dormitory. It was long enough to accommodate all eighteen boys in Viper House, and draughty enough to accommodate the great outdoors. Its designer may have had comfort in mind, but only so that he could avoid it wherever possible.


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.


"Priests" were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles.


He could send for Ptraci, his favourite handmaiden. She was special. Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.


Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.


Dios, First Minister and high priest among high priests, wasn't a naturally religious man. It wasn't a desirable quality in a high priest, it affected your judgement and made you unsound.


He would probably have added that the only difference between Koomi and a sacred crocodile was the crocodile's basic honesty of purpose.


And now you are all dismissed. Go away. See to your gods!


'A case of mortis portalis tackulatum with complications.'
'What's that mean?'
'In layman's terms, he's as dead as a doornail.'
'What are the complications?'
'He's still breathing,'


'Look, his pulse is nearly humming and he's got a temperature you could fry eggs on.' He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightforward and easily understood; medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn't going to get anywhere if people could understand it. 'Pyrocerebrum ouerf culinaire,' he said, after working it out in his head.


'Well, what can you do about it?' said Arthur. 
'Nothing. He's dead. All the medical tests prove it. So, er... bury him, keep him nice and cool, and tell him to come and see me next week. In daylight, for preference.'


He suspected that the Guild, who after all had an unrivalled experience of sharp knives and complex organic compounds, was much better at elementary diagnostics than were the doctors. The Guild might kill people, but at least it didn't expect them to be grateful for it.


You scrimped and saved to send your sons to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.


Various-headed gods vied for his attention, explaining details of godhood.


Unlike proper cell windows, which should be large and airy and requiring only the removal of a few inconvenient iron bars to ensure the escape of any captives, this window was a slit six inches wide.


Teppic had learned how not to move stealthily. Millions of years of being eaten by creatures that know how to move stealthily has made humanity very good at spotting stealthy movement.


Assassins liked the night on general principles, but the night of the necropolis was something else. Or rather, it was the same thing, but a lot more of it. Besides, it was the only city anywhere on the Disc where an assassin couldn't find employment.


The camel looked along its nose at Teppic. Its expression made it clear that of all the riders in all the world it would least like to ride it, he was right at the top of the list. However, camels look like that at everyone. Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race.


He landed heavily on a floor that seemed undecided about becoming a wall.


This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human's hand and eye co-ordination, a chameleon's camouflage and a dolphin's renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there's any chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adversely by other humans.


He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them. It seemed to be moving in and out of focus, which he felt instinctively was a dangerous thing for several million tons of rock to do.


Dil was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were here that was the terrible part.


He'd recognised a wind-eroded sphinx that had been set up as a boundary marker; legend said it prowled the borders in times of dire national need, although legend wasn't sure why.


And here comes Sessifet, Goddess of the Afternoon! This is a surprise! What a surprise this is! A young goddess, yet to make her mark, but my word, what a lot of promise there, this is an astonishing bid, eunuchs and gentlemen.


'They're our gods,' Dios hissed. 'We're not their people. They're my gods and they will learn to do as they are instructed!'


'What's my son got to say about all this?'
'Don't know how to tell you this, sir,'
'Out with it, man.'
'Sir, they say he's dead, sir. They say he killed himself and ran away.'


A favourite trick of Ephebian gods, he recalled, was turning into some animal in order to gain the favours of highly-placed Ephebian women. And one of them had reputedly turned himself into a golden shower in pursuit of his intended. All this raised interesting questions about everyday night life in sophisticated Ephebe.


It was generally agreed by mariners to be a very beautiful lighthouse and something to look at while they were waiting to be towed off the rocks.


'Oh, yes. I was being persecuted for my beliefs.'
'That's terrible,' said Teppic.
'Damn right. I believed people wouldn't notice I'd sold them camels with plaster teeth until I was well out of town.'


Gern led the way, his face a picture, possibly one painted late at night by an artist who got his inspiration on prescription.


There's a tendency to declare that there is more backsliding around than in the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, and that it's time to wipe the slate clean. Blood is generally considered very efficient for this purpose.


The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.


It has to be said... there was little to laugh at in the cellar of the Quisition. Not if you had a normal sense of humor. There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don't Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!!!


Orders from the hierarchy were to be obeyed without question, unless the questioner wanted to find himself faced with more important questions like whether or not it is possible to go to heaven after being roasted alive.


There were twenty-three other novices in Brutha's dormitory, on the principle that sleeping alone promoted sin. This always puzzled the novices themselves, since a moment's reflection would suggest that there were whole ranges of sins only available in company.


When the Omnian Church found out about Koomi, they displayed him in every town within the Church's empire to demonstrate the essential flaws in his argument.
There were a lot of towns, so they had to cut him up quite small.


There was something wrong. Om couldn't quite put his finger on it, and not only because he didn't have a finger.


"Where there is punishment, there is always a crime," said the inquisitor. "Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God."


"Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose."


The furthest anyone ever got through the labyrinth without a guide was nineteen paces. Well, more or less. His head rolled a further seven paces, but that probably doesn't count.


"What sort of place is Ankh?"
"A city of a million souls," said Om, "many of them occupying bodies."


"I said to him, 'There is no royal road to learning, sire,' and he said to me, 'Bloody well build one or I shall have your legs chopped off. Use as many slaves as you like.' A refreshingly direct approach, I always thought. Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words."


"Now there's a power," he said. "Harnessing the lightning! The dream of mankind!"
"Is it? It's not my dream," said Didactylos. "I always dream of a giant carrot chasing me through a field of lobsters."


Seagulls never ventured this far along the desert coast. Their niche was filled by the scalbie, a member of the crow family that the crow family would be the first to disown and never talked about in company. 


Do unto others before they do unto you.


"There's bones everywhere!"
"Well? What did you expect? This is a desert! People die here! It's a very popular occupation in this vicinity!"


Dhblah sidled closer. This was not hard. Dhblah sidled everywhere. Crabs thought he walked sideways.


That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.


"You Don't Even Believe In Me!"
"Yes, but I'm a practical man."
"And Brave, Too, To Declare Atheism Before Your God."
"This doesn't change anything, you know! Don't think you can get round me by existing!"


"Let's say a skion turns up, walks up to the Patrician, says 'What ho, I'm king, here's the birthmark as per spec, now bugger off'. What's he got then? Life expectancy of maybe two minutes, that's what."


Thunder rolled...
It rolled a six.


Finding that you are dead is mitigated by also finding that there really is a you who can find you dead.


Thick coils of smoke hung in the air, perhaps to avoid touching the walls.


"He's fighting in there!"
"All by himself?"
"No, with everyone!"


People in Scoone Avenue had old money, which was supposed to be much better than new money, although Captain Vimes had never had enough of either to spot the difference. 


People in Scoone Avenue were said to be so aloof they wouldn't even talk to the gods. This was a slight slander. They would talk to gods, if they were well-bred gods of decent family.


"I understand [dragons] have a liking for gold."
"Really? What do they spend it on?"
"They sleep on it, my lord."
"What, do you mean in a mattress?"
"No, my lord. On it. "
"Don't they find it rather knobbly?"
"So I would imagine, sir. I don't suppose anyone has ever asked."


Many of the faces were attached to bodies holding a fearsome array of homely weapons that had been handed down from generation to generation for centuries, often with some force.


Now that the snowball of consciousness is starting to roll, is it going to find that it's waking up inside a body lying in a gutter with something multiple, the noun doesn't matter after an adjective like "multiple", nothing good ever follows "multiple", or is it going to be a case of crisp sheets, a soothing hand, and a businesslike figure in white pulling open the curtains on a bright new day? Is it all over, with nothing worse to look forward to now than weak tea, nourishing gruel, short, strengthening walks in the garden and possibly a brief platonic love affair with a ministering angel, or was this all just a moment's blackout and some looming bastard is now about to get down to real business with the thick end of a pickaxe helve? Are there, the consciousness wants to know, going to be grapes?


Ankh-Morpork did not have many hospitals. All the Guilds maintained their own sanitariums, and there were a few public ones run by the odder religious organisations, but by and large medical assistance was nonexistent and people had to die inefficiently, without the aid of doctors.


Now that he could halfway focus, he could see a certain lack of bachelor sockness about the place.


Vimes wondered how many swamp dragons had been killed by enterprising heroes. It was terribly cruel to do something like that to creatures whose only crime was to blow themselves absent-mindedly to pieces in mid-air, which was not something any individual dragon made a habit of.


They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt.


"I've always thought that one of the major problems of being a king is the risk of your daughter getting a prick."
"And falling asleep for a hundred years,"
"And then there's wear and tear on peas,"


The people of Ankh-Morpork had always been staunchly independent, yielding to no man their right to rob, defraud, embezzle and murder on an equal basis.


There was no difference at all between the richest man and the poorest beggar, apart from the fact that the former had lots of money, food, power, fine clothes, and good health. But at least he wasn't any better.


Very senior librarians, however, once they have proved themselves worthy by performing some valiant act of librarianship, are accepted into a secret order and are taught the raw arts of survival beyond the Shelves We Know.


To his shame, Vimes realised that his legs were going to have nothing to do with any mad dash to drag her back. His pride didn't like that, but his body pointed out that it wasn't his pride that stood a very reasonable chance of being thinly laminated to the nearest building.


"Might have been just an innocent bystander, sir," said Carrot.
"What, in Ankh-Morpork?"
"Yes, sir."
"We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value," said Vimes.


Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.


He sighed. It wasn't a rewarding job, being chief beggar. It was the differentials that did for you. Low-grade beggars made a reasonable enough living on pennies, but people tended to look the other way when you asked them for a sixteen-bedroom mansion for the night.


There had never been an official coronation service in Ankh-Morpork, as far as he could find out. The old kings had managed quite well with something on the lines of: "We hath got the crown, i'faith, and we will kill any whoreson who tries to takes it away, by the Lord Harry." 


If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.


Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not as stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...


At a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...


He felt the dragon's genuine astonishment of some of the less commendable areas of human history, which were most of it. And after the astonishment came the baffled anger. There was practically nothing the dragon could do to people that they had not, sooner or later, tried on one another, often with enthusiasm.


"A dwarf can go hundreds of miles with a cake like this in his pack," Carrot went on.
"I bet he can," said Colon gloomily, "I bet all the time he'd be thinking, 'Bloody hell, I hope I can find something else to eat soon, otherwise it's the bloody cake again.' "
Carrot, to whom the word irony meant something to do with metal, picked up his pike and after a couple of impressive rebounds managed to cut the cake into approximately four slices.


Carrot picked up his pike and after a couple of impressive rebounds managed to cut the cake into approximately four slices.


There was some more silence, very similar to the earlier silence but even deeper and more furrowed with depression.


Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian.


Not that you really needed a bucket to pick up the turbid waters of the river Ankh - a net was good enough.


I wish Captain Vimes were here, he thought. He wouldn't have known what to do either, but he's got a much better vocabulary to be baffled in.


"Anyway, you get one dollar responsibility allowance, too."
"No I don't! Captain Vimes said he was docking it for five years for being a disgrace to the species!"


What would Captain Vimes do now? Well, he'd have a drink. But if he didn't have a drink, what would he do?
"What we need," he said slowly, "is a Plan."
That sounded good. That sentence alone sounded worth the pay. If you had a Plan, you were halfway there.


And already he thought he could hear the cheering of crowds. They were lining the streets, and they were throwing flowers, and he was being carried triumphantly through the grateful city. The drawback was, he suspected, that he was being carried in an urn.


"You, er, want us to attack him?" said the guard miserably. Thick though the palace guard were, they were as aware as everyone else of the conventions, and when guards are summoned to deal with one man in overheated circumstances it's not a good time for them. The bugger's bound to be heroic, he was thinking. This guard was not looking forward to a future in which he was dead.


"You, er, want us to attack him?" said the guard miserably.
"Of course, you idiot!"
"But, er, there's only one of him," said the guard captain.
"And he's smilin'," said a man behind him.
"Prob'ly goin' to swing on the chandeliers any minute," said one of his colleagues. "And kick over the table, and that."
"He's not even armed!" shrieked Wonse.
"Worst kind, that," said one of the guards, with deep stoicism. "They leap up, see, and grab one of the ornamental swords behind the shield over the fireplace."
"Yeah," said another, suspiciously. "And then they chucks a chair at you."


"If you'd thought, " added the captain sarcastically, "you'd have thought that the king is hardly going to want other dragons dead, is he? They're probably distant relatives or something. I mean, it wouldn't want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?''
"Well, sir, people do, sir," said the guard sulkily.
"Ah, well," said the captain. "That's different." He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. "That's 'cos we're intelligent."


"I say kinging's a good job," Nobby repeated. "Short hours."
"Yeah. Yeah. But not long days,"


It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man would have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead. It would be hard to be deader without special training.


"Arrest the suspect, Sarge," said Corporal Nobbs, saluting smartly. 
"Suspect, Nobby?" 
"Him," said Nobby, prodding the corpse with his boot. "I call it highly suspicious, being dead like that. He's been drinking, too. We could do him for being dead and disorderly." 


Murder cases were really strange when the victim could be the chief witness.


There was a village tucked in a narrow valley between steep woods. It wasn't a large village, and wouldn't have shown up on a map of the mountains. It barely showed up on a map of the village. 


Mist curled between the houses as the wizard crossed a narrow bridge over the swollen stream and made his way to the village smithy, although the two facts had nothing to do with one another. The mist would have curled anyway: it was experienced mist and had got curling down to a fine art. 


"Oh." A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces. 


"And what are you doing on my boat, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune?" 
"Can't girls seek their fortune?" 
"I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune,"


A crystal was a tricky thing to use at the best of times, and usually staring into it meant that the one thing the future could be guaranteed to hold was a severe migraine.


There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains.


A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history. 


Over large parts of the continent people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.


And it was while Granny Weatherwax, sweating and cursing, was running along a forest path holding the [broom] at shoulder height for the tenth time that she had found the bear trap. 
The second problem was that a bear had found it first. In fact this hadn't been too much of a problem because Granny, already in a bad temper, hit it right between the eyes with the broomstick and it was now sitting as far away from her as it was possible to get in a pit, and trying to think happy thoughts.


The dwarf halls rang to the sound of hammers, although mainly for effect. Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in the clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image. 


It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.


I don't think you quite understand. I don't want to hit the ground. It's never done anything to me.


She was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.


The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.


Beams of blue light lanced out into the corridor, moving and dancing as indistinct shapes shuffled through the blinding brilliance inside the room. The light was misty and actinic, the sort of light to make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer. 


There are storms that are frankly theatrical, all sheet lightning and metallic thunder rolls. There are storms that are tropical and sultry, and incline to hot winds and fireballs. But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land. 


The grounds of the University stretched right down to the river. By day they were a neat formal pattern of gravel paths and hedges, but in the middle of a wet wild night the hedges seemed to have moved and the paths had simply gone off somewhere to stay dry. 


He sat up, and was surprised to find that while someone he was certainly inclined to think of as himself was sitting up, something very much like his body remained lying on the floor.
It was a pretty good body, incidentally, now he came to see it from outside for the first time. He had always been quite attached to it although, he had to admit, this did not now seem to be the case.


The step in question was at the top of the flight leading to the Great Hall, down which King Verence had tumbled in the dark only to land, against all the laws of probability, on his own dagger.
It had, however, been declared by his own physician to be a case of natural causes. Bentzen had gone to see the man and explained that falling down a flight of steps with a dagger in your back was a disease caused by unwise opening of the mouth.


"Right. Very good. You've got the general idea. Now let's spread out again, and this time we spread out separately."


The door opened. It opened very slowly, and with the maximum amount of creak. Simple neglect wouldn't have caused that depth of groan; you'd need careful work with hot water over a period of weeks.


There was plenty of flat ground in the Ramtops. The problem was that nearly all of it was vertical.


And, with alarming suddenness, nothing happened.


The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.


She was out of breath, and wore only a shawl over a nightdress that, if Magrat had anything to reveal, would have been very revealing.


Magrat came hurrying up the path from Mad Stoat, a village whose good-natured inhabitants were getting used to ear massage and flower-based homeopathic remedies for everything short of actual decapitation


Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.


Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox.


The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was 'la', but she was making it work hard.


'The new sergeant they've got is a keen man when it comes to setting fire to cottages, too. Old Verence used to do it too, mind, but... well...'
'I know, I know. It was more personal,' said Granny. 'You felt he meant it. People like to feel they're valued.'


The clusters of amulets, magical jewellery and occult bangles on various parts of her body jingled together; any enemy wouldn't only have to be blind to fail to notice that a witch was approaching, he'd have to be deaf as well.


Hurting old ladies in cold blood wasn't his cup of tea, and actually hurting witches in blood of any temperature whatsoever failed to be an entire twelve-course banquet.


It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.


Her eyeshadow had not so much run as sprinted.


Granny's implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.


What Magrat had achieved was a mere adjustment of the mental processes, from a bewildered and slightly frightened woman gliding inexorably towards the inhospitable ground to a clearheaded, optimistic and positive thinking woman who had really got it together, was taking full responsibility for her own life and in general knew where she was coming from although, unfortunately, where she was heading had not changed in any way. But she felt a lot better about it.


Hour gongs were being struck all across the city and nightwatchmen were proclaiming that it was indeed midnight and also that, in the face of all the evidence, all was well. Many of them got as far as the end of the sentence before being mugged.


It's like taking a vow not to swim. You'll absolutely never break it unless of course you happen to find yourself in the water.


The duchess glared at him, suggesting that his imagination could consider itself lucky it wasn't being dragged off to the courtyard to explain itself to four angry wild horses and a length of chain.


'But I think you have a right to know what it is you're not being told.'


"Witches just aren't like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it's wicked of them to say we don't. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead."


Magrat pushed her way through the actors and clasped him to what could charitably be called her bosom.


It crept upon him in a cold and clammy way that once he was king, he could do anything he wanted. Provided that what he wanted to do was be king.


Tomjon left the stage to thunderous applause at the concluding act of The Troll ofAnkh. A hundred people would go home tonight wondering whether trolls were really as bad as they had hitherto thought although, of course, this wouldn't actually stop them disliking them in any way whatsoever.


Magrat didn't like cats and hated the idea of mousetraps. She'd always felt that it should be possible to come to some sort of arrangement with creatures like mice so that all available food was rationed in the best interest of all parties. This was a very humanitarian outlook, which is to say that it was not a view shared by mice, and therefore her moonlit kitchen was alive.


She had spent the previous day gradually chipping away the mortar around the bars of her window although, in truth, you could hack your way out of the average Lancre Castle wall with a piece of cheese.


But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself - partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.


Compared to all this, a large turtle with a world on its back is practically mundane. At least it doesn't pretend it doesn't exist, and no-one on the Discworld ever tried to prove it didn't exist in case they turned out to be right and found themselves suddenly floating in empty space.


Local people called it the Bear Mountain. This was because it was a bare mountain, not because it had a lot of bears on it.


Desiderata had been blind for thirty years, but this hadn't been a problem. She'd always been blessed, if that was the word, with second sight. So when the ordinary eyes gave out you just trained yourself to see into the present, which anyway was easier than the future. And since the eyeball of the occult didn't depend on light, you saved on candles.


She was not someone to use extreme language, but it was possible to be sure that when she deployed a mild term like 'a bee in her bonnet' she was using it to define someone whom she believed to be several miles over the madness horizon and accelerating.


Death said nothing. From where he sat, Desiderata reflected, losing was something that everyone learned.


Granny Weatherwax's famous goose-grease-and-sage chest liniment didn't make you fly and see visions, but it did prevent colds, if only because the distressing smell that developed around about the second week kept everyone else so far away you couldn't catch anything from them.


There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.'


When people say 'An idea came to me' it isn't just a metaphor. Raw inspirations, tiny particles of self-contained thought, are sleeting through the cosmos all the time. They get drawn to heads like Magrat's in the same way that water runs into a hole in the desert


Nanny Ogg was more sympathetic but had a tendency to come out with what Magrat thought of as double-intenders, although in Nanny Ogg's case they were generally single entendres and proud of it.


It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.


Currently Magrat was finding herself through the Path of The Scorpion, which offered cosmic harmony, inner one-ness and the possibility of knocking an attacker's kidneys out through his ears. She'd sent off for it.


The Oggs were what is known as an extended family - in fact not only extended but elongated, protracted and persistent. No normal sheet of paper could possibly trace their family tree.


They were the kind of mountains where winters went for their summer holidays.


Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren't explorers and didn't count.


[The cat] had trotted into the woods and found some wolves and had sat and grinned at them until they got uncomfortable and went away. Yes, it had been a very uneventful night.


She could do things with a chicken that would almost make it glad it had been killed.


She felt slightly ashamed of letting an honest woman believe that she could see the future in a pot of gumbo. Because all you could see in a pot of Mrs Gogol's gumbo was that the future certainly contained a very good meal. She'd really seen it in a bowl of jambalaya she'd prepared earlier.


Magrat says she will write a book called Travelling on One Dollar a Day, and it's always the same dollar.


Birds sang in the trees on the distant banks. The scent of hibiscus wafted across the water, almost but unfortunately not quite overpowering the scent of the river itself


She wasn't at all certain about the meaning of the word 'decadent'. She'd dismissed the possibility that it meant 'having ten teeth' in the same sense that Nanny Ogg, for example, was unident.


The phrase 'card sharp' had never reached her side of the Ramtops, where people were friendly and direct and, should they encounter a professional cheat, tended to nail his hand to the table in an easy and outgoing manner without asking him what he called himself


All witches are very conscious of stories. They can feel stories, in the same way that a bather in a little pool can feel the unexpected trout


But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No-one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you'd rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.


The row cooled a bit, simply because both sides were not talking to each other. Not simply not exchanging vocal communication - that's just an absence of speaking. This went right through that and out the other side, into the horrible glowering worlds of Not Talking to One Another.


'I've got nothing against dead people,' she said. 'Some of my best friends are dead. It just don't seem right, though, dead people walking about.'


Magrat paused in the big, red-velvet ante-room. Strange thoughts fireworked around her head; she hadn't felt like this since the herbal wine. But struggling among them like a tiny prosaic potato in a spray of psychedelic chrysanthemums was an inner voice screaming that she didn't even know how to dance.


"Oh?" she said. "Young Verence popped the question, then?" 
"Yes!" 
"When's the happy event?" said Granny Weatherwax, icily. 
"Two weeks' time," said Magrat. "Midsummer Day." 
"Bad choice, bad choice," said Nanny Ogg. "Shortest night o' the year-"


Witches generally act as layers-out of the dead as well as midwives; there were plenty of people in Lancre for whom Nanny Ogg's face had been the first and last thing they'd ever seen, which had probably made all the bit in the middle seem quite uneventful by comparison. 


Are you saying," said Ridcully, "that getting robbed is included in the price?" 
"Bandits' Guild," said the coachman. "Forty dollars per head, see. It's a kind of flat rate." 
"What happens if we don't pay it?" said Ridcully. 
"You end up flat."


"When you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in touble." 
"But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg. 
"That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em."


What's the point of having a king, they thought, if you have to rule yourself? He should do his job, even if he couldn't spell properly. No one was asking him to thatch roofs or milk cows, were they?


Verence had planted it because he'd heard that stately castles should have a maze and everyone agreed that, once the bushes were a bit higher than their current height of about one foot, it would indeed be a very famous maze and people would be able to get lost in it without having to shut their eyes and bend down.


Strictly speaking, Hodgesaargh wasn't his real name. On the other hand, on the basis that someone's real name is the name they introduce themselves to you by, he was definitely Hodgesaargh.


It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to be made up of resons or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five "flavours," known as "up," "down," "sideways," "sex appeal," and "peppermint."


It wasn't exactly whiskey, and it wasn't exactly gin, but it was exactly 90 degrees proof, and a great comfort during those worrying moments that sometimes occurred around 3 A.M. when you woke up and forgot who you were. After a glass of the clear liquid you still didn't remember who you were, but that was all right now because you were someone else anyway.


She peered at the label. "Chateau Maison? Chat-eau . . . that's foreign for cat's water, you know, but that's only their way, I know it ain't real cat's water. Real cat's water is sharper."


This needed working out. He wasn't on guard from things inside the castle, was he? "On guard" meant things outside. That was the point of castles. That's why you had all the walls and things.


Shawn was not yet used to thinly clad young women approaching him with a dreamy look on their faces.


Carter [...] squeezed the accordion. There was the long-drawn-out chord that by law must precede all folk music to give bystanders time to get away.


The inn was a wreck. The elves had stripped it of everything edible and rolled out every barrel, although a couple of rogue cheeses in the cellar had put up quite a fight.


"Magrat says a broomstick is one of them sexual metaphor things. The difference being, that a broomstick stays up longer. And you can use it to keep the house clean, which is more than you can say for..."


"These boots were stitched by the finest shoemaker in Ankh-Morpork," said Casanunda, "and one day I shall pay him." 


Then there was the sword. Despite Shawn's misgivings, Magrat did in theory know what you did with a sword. You tried to stick it into the enemy by a vigorous arm motion, and the enemy tried to stop you. She was a little uncertain about what happened next. She hoped you were allowed another go.


Everyone in Lancre knew about Esme Weatherwax's mysterious box. It was variously rumoured to contain books of spells, a small private universe, cures for all ills, the deeds of lost lands and several tons of gold, which was pretty good going for something less than a foot across.


There was a click. She looked down the length of a crossbow and met Magrat's steady gaze. "Go ahead," said the Queen of Lancre softly, "bake my quiche."


"There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts."


I save about twenty drafts - that's ten meg of disc space - and the last one contains all the ?nal alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.


The neighbours preferred explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.


Explosions were part of the scenery, such as was left.


A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.


[They] weren't really beards but more like groups of individual hairs clustering together for mutual protection.


By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.


'Do you know how to handle a sword?'
'A little,'
He'd used one sometimes in the gym. He'd never in fact fought an opponent, but he had practised an energetic and idiosyncratic technique in front of the mirror, and the mirror had never beaten him yet.


New houses, new streets, new neighbourhoods, appeared overnight. And, in those areas where the hastily-educated alchemical apprentices were not yet fully alongside the trickier stages of making octo-cellulose, disappeared even faster.


Around the tables there were trolls, humans and dwarfs. And a few gnomes. And perhaps even a few elves, the most elusive of Discworld races. And lots of other things, which Victor had to hope were trolls dressed up, because if they weren't, everyone was going to be in a lot of trouble. And they were all eating, and the amazing thing was that they were not eating one another.


Lord Vetinari [...] was failed in his stealth examination due to his apparent absence in class.


Her genius even extends to the written language, since it will be obvious to our readers that she has an approach to grammar and spelling that is all her very own. As far as punctuation goes she appears to have no approach at all, but seems merely to throw it at the page from a distance, like playing darts.


We have, reluctantly, translated the weights and measures used in the cookery recipes into metric terms because Nanny Ogg used throughout the very specialized unit of measure known as the 'some'.


The 'some' is a unit of some, you see, complexity. Some flour is almost certainly more than some salt, but there appears to be no such thing as half of some, although there was the occasional mention of a 'bit' as in 'a bit of pepper'.


We have not been able to come up with a reliable length of time equivalent to a 'while', which is an exponential measurement - one editor considered on empirical evidence that a 'while' in cookery was about 35 minutes, but we found several usages elsewhere of 'quite a while' extending up to ten years, which is a bit long for batter to stand. 'As long as it takes to sing "Where Has All The Custard Gone?"' looked helpful, but we haven't been able to find the words, so we have had to resort to boring old minutes.


So, we have to say, strict accuracy [of this cookbook] has been sacrificed in the interests of having as many readers at the end of this book as we had at the start.


"You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world? It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad ploughmen instead."


'But they're amateurs! And crooks!'
'Well, that's a relief, Mr Dibbler.'
'Why's that?'
'Well, it'd be dreadful if they were crooks and professional.'


The Necrotelicomnicom was written by the Klatchian necromancer Achmed the Mad (although he
preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches).


The book contained forbidden knowledge. Well, not actually forbidden. No-one had ever gone so far as forbidding it. Apart from anything else, in order to forbid it you'd have to know what it was, which was forbidden. But it definitely contained the sort of information which, once you knew it, you wished you hadn't.


Perhaps he should just start up a conversation and wait until it got around naturally to monstrosities from Beyond the Void.


It rose up in his memory like the suddenly-discovered bit of suspicious tentacle just when you thought it was safe to eat the paella.


Many people[22] considered that a good fire every hundred years or so was essential to the health of the city since it helped to keep down the rats, roaches, fleas and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses.

[22] The ones living in stone buildings, anyway.


'Huh. Stay, he says. Givin' me orders. Jus' so's his girlfriend doesn't have to have a horrid smelly dog in her room. So here's me, man's best friend, sittin' out in the rain. If it was rainin', anyway. Maybe it ain't rainin', but if it was rainin', I'd be soaked by now. Serve him right if I just upped and walked away. I could do it, too. Any time I wanted. I don't have to sit here. I hope no-one's thinkin' I'm sittin' here because I've been told to sit here. I'd like to see the human who could give me orders. I'm sittin' here 'cos I want to. Yeah.'


So here's me, man's best friend, sittin' out in the rain. If it was rainin', anyway. Maybe it ain't rainin', but if it was rainin', I'd be soaked by now. Serve him right if I just upped and walked away.


There were stories about people dreaming about being executed and then, when someone had touched them on the shoulder to wake them up, their heads had fallen off. How anyone ever knew what a dead person had been dreaming wasn't disclosed.


Someone was shouting, but politely, as if they wanted to be helped but only if it wouldn't be too much trouble.


Yetis are a high-altitude species of troll, and quite unaware that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If it doesn't, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.


Held in Victor's arms, against the background of the flaming city, Ginger was portrayed as not only showing nearly all she had but quite a lot of what she had not, strictly speaking, got.


'Who are all these people?' she said.
'They're fans,' said Dibbler.
'But I'm not hot!'
'Uncle means that they're people who like seeing you in the clicks,' said Soll. 'Er. Like you a lot.'


The Lecturer in Recent Runes nudged the Chair heavily in the ribs, or at least at the point where the ribs were overlaid by the strata of fifty years of very good dinners.


Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.


Victor drew himself up to his full height. 'There are some Things', he said, 'that a man has to do by himself.'
She gave him a look of irritated incomprehension.
'What? What? Do you want to go to the lavatory or something?'


[The Librarian] was realizing that, if you have tied a rope to the top of a very high and extremely solid stone tower and are now swinging towards it, failing to hit something on the way is an error which you will regret for the rest of your truncated life.


Being trampled almost to death by a preoccupied troll is almost the ideal cure for a person confused about what is real and what isn't.


The Guild library was one of the largest in the city. In certain specialized areas it was the largest. These areas mainly had to do with the regrettable brevity of human life and the means of bringing it about.


He had the [i]Means[/i], and he had the [i]end[/i]. And so on... Edward's thoughts often ran like this.
He could think in italics. Such people need watching.
Preferably from a safe distance.


Dwarfs are very attached to gold. Any highwayman demanding 'Your money or your life' had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on.


Eat dragons, it proclaims, and you'll have a case of indigestion to which the term 'blast radius' will be appropriate.


Fingers-Mazda, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot.*

He got really burned on that deal.


'Don't worry, miss,' said Colon. 'He-'
'Lance-Constable,' said Angua.
'What?'
'Lance-Constable,' she repeated. 'Not miss. Carrot says I [shouldn't] have any sex while I'm on duty.'


He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no-one knew where he kept it.


Vimes would be the first to admit that he wasn't a good copper, but he'd probably be spared the chore because lots of other people would happily admit it for him.


Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme.


Dwarfs are known for their sense of humour, in a way. People point them out and say: 'Those little devils haven't got a sense of humour.'


Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful.


Very slowly, like a mighty sequoia beginning the first step towards resurrection as a million Save The Trees leaflets, Detritus toppled backwards with his mug still in his hand.


A survey by the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Merchants of tradespeople in the dock areas of Morpork found 987 women who gave their profession as 'seamstress'. Oh... and two needles.


He'd tried to indicate as subtly as possible that a wholesale march on Quarry Lane would be frowned upon by the guard (probably from a vantage point at a safe distance) but hadn't the face to spell it out.


There were varieties of werewolf. Some people merely had to shave every hour and wear a hat to cover the ears. They could pass for nearly normal.


[Their] normal response to a remark from a Watchman would be genteelly paraphrased by a string of symbols generally found on the top row of a typewriter's keyboard.


He's just geographically divergent in the financial hemisphere.'
'Sir?'
'I mean he just disagrees with other people about the position of things. Like money. He thinks it should all be in his pocket.'


The Alchemists' Guild was opposite the Gamblers' Guild. Usually. Sometimes it was above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.


'We're Watchmen,' said Cuddy. 'Our job is to keep the peace.'
'Good,' said Stronginthearm. 'Go and keep it safe somewhere until we need it.'


'Where [does] this [alley] go?'
'It goes away from the people chasing us!'
'I [i]like[/i] this alley.'


'He only drinks when he gets depressed,' said Carrot.
'Why does he get depressed?'
'Sometimes it's because he hasn't had a drink.'


Mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark.


If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.


The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them.


[The Librarian] liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in [his] opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.


A night watchman in crappy armour is about your metier,' said Colon, who looked around proudly to see if anyone had noticed the slanty thing over the e


People thought he was mad, but this was not, technically, the case. It was just that he was in touch with reality on the cosmic level, and had a bit of trouble focusing on things smaller, like other people, walls and soap (although on very small things, such as coins, his eyesight was Grade A).


Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.


'Don't you know? You are Death, aren't you?'
THAT DOESN'T MEAN I HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT BURIAL CUSTOMS. GENERALLY, I MEET PEOPLE BEFORE THEY'RE BURIED. THE ONES I MEET AFTER THEY'VE BEEN BURIED TEND TO BE A BIT OVER-EXCITED AND DISINCLINED TO DISCUSS THINGS.


The waters of the Ankh, to use the element in its broadest sense, had washed, to bend the definition to its limit, these tunnels for centuries.


The Archchancellor had also given him a long drink of something he said was a marvellous remedy, although he'd been unspecific as to what it cured. Verticality, apparently.


There was a small priest who gave the generic fill-in-deceased's-name-here service, designed to be vaguely satisfactory to any gods who might be listening.


Of course, Granny Weatherwax made a great play of her  independence and self-reliance. But the point about that kind of stuff was that you needed someone around to be proudly independent and self-reliant at.

People who didn't need people needed people around  to know  that  they were the kind of people who didn't need people.


And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets that you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up.


It wasn't so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely postponed.


The  person  behind  it  must  have  been  a  human  being because walruses don't wear coats. [...] It really was an impressive moustache, which had sapped all the growth from the rest of its owner.


She'd  even  given  herself  a  middle  initial - X - which  stood  for 'someone who has a cool and exciting middle initial'.


Violet Frottidge  was  walking  out  with  young  Deviousness  Carter,  or  at  least  doing  something  within ninety  degrees  of  walking  out.


The girl who had spoken to her was slightly built, even by ordinary standards, and had gone to some pains  to make herself  look even  thinner. She had  long blond hair and  the happy smile of someone who is aware that she is thin and has long blond hair.


She did not regard mirrors as naturally friendly.


It wasn't so much  the personality,  it was  the  'but'  that people always added when  they  talked about it. 'But she's got a lovely personality,' they said.


Nanny  Ogg  could  see  the  future  in  the  froth  on  a  beermug.  It  invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for.


[He] looked as though the only worries he might have in the world were a tendency for small objects to gravitate towards him and the occasional tide.


If you wanted a quiet retirement, Mr Bucket, you  shouldn't  have  bought  the  Opera  House.  You  should  have  done something  peaceful,  like alligator dentistry.


The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille.


This [...] meant  that  Ankh-Morpork  was,  for  example,  denied  the  benefit  of  newspapers, leaving the population to fool themselves as best they could. 


'Oh yes? Can you identify yourself?' 
'Certainly. I'd know me anywhere.'


'Says  here  that  Dame  Timpani,  who  sings  the  part  of Quizella,  is  a  diva,'  sanny.  'So  I reckon  this  is  like a part-time  job,  then. Prob'ly quite a good  idea, on account of you have  to be able to hold your breath. Good trainin' for the singin'.'


Agnes arranged  the  flowers Lancre  fashion, which was  to hold  the pot with one hand and  the bouquet in the other and forcibly bring the two into conjunction.


The shop bell tinkled in a refined tone, as if it were embarrassed to do something as vulgar as ring. It would have much preferred to give a polite cough.


As  a conversational gambit,  'Hello,  I understand  you have a  lot of money,  can  I have  some please?' lacked, he felt, a certain subtlety.


Bergholt  Stuttley  ('Bloody  Stupid')  Johnson  was  Ankh-Morpork's  most  famous,  or  rather  most  notorious,  inventor.  He  was renowned  for never  letting his number-blindness, his  lack of  any  skill whatsoever or his  complete  failure  to grasp  the  essence of  a problem stand  in the way of his cheerful progress as the first Counter-Renaissance man. Shortly after building the famous Collapsed Tower of Quirm he  turned his attention  to  the world of music, particularly  large organs and mechanical orchestras. Examples of his handiwork still occasionally come to light in sales, auctions and, quite frequently, wreckage.


His progress  through  life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people.


There was their approach to theft, for example. Nanny had a witch's view of theft, which was a lot more complicated than the attitude adopted by the law and, if it came to it, people who owned property worth stealing. They tended to wield the huge blunt axe of the law in circumstances that required the delicate scalpel of common sense.


A tingling at the base of his spine indicated that his tail wanted to grow, and his ears definitely wanted to creep up the sides of his head, which is always embarrassing when it happens in company. In  this case  the company was about a hundred yards behind and apparently  intent on moving his ears quite a long way from their current position, embarrassment or not.


Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts  too black even  for a witch.


Men said things like 'peace in our time' or 'an empire that will last a thousand years', and less than half a lifetime later no one even remembered who they were, let alone what they had said or where the mob had buried their ashes.


Detritus was particularly good when it came to asking questions. He had three basic ones. They were the direct ('Did you do it?'), the persistent ('Are you sure it wasn't you what done it?') and the subtle ('It was you what done it, wasn't it?'). Although they were not the most cunning questions ever devised, Detritus's talent was to go on patiently asking them for hours on end, until he got the right answer, which was generally something like: 'Yes! Yes! I did it! I did it! Now please tell me what it was I did!'


It was like the back rooms of museums everywhere, full of junk and things there is no room for on the shelves and also items of doubtful provenance, such as coins dated '52 BC'.


The owner of the voice made it very clear that he was aware there were degrees of nobility from something above kingship stretching all the way down to commoner, and that as far as Corporal Nobbs was concerned an entirely new category - commonest, perhaps - would have to be coined.


He was known as a supplier of things. More or less any kind of things. And he was also a wall, which was the same as a fence only a lot harder and tougher to beat.


'It's never too soon to contemplate eternal damnation, sir.'


But the Watch was back and out there on the streets, and if they weren't actually as good as Detritus at kicking arse they were definitely prodding buttock.


The guild looked after you from the cradle to the grave or, in the case of the Assassins, to other people's graves.


At the end of Nonesuch Street was a gibbet, where wrongdoers - or, at least, people found guilty of wrongdoing - had been hung to twist gently in the wind as examples of just retribution and, as the elements took their toll, basic anatomy as well.


Colon in particular had great difficulty with the idea that you went on investigating after someone had confessed. It outraged his training and experience. You got a confession and there it ended. You didn't go around disbelieving people. You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. Anything else struck at the whole basis of policing.


"Cos... what good'd a lot of moneneney do me, hey?' The [bar's] clientele looked puzzled. This seemed to be a question on the lines of 'Alcohol, is it nice?', or 'Hard work, do you want to do it?'.


He was just one of the scarred, ill shaven regulars whose function it was, around about this time of an evening, to start opening bottles with his teeth or, if the evening was going really well, with somebody else's teeth.


They did have instructions like 'Adde Aqua Quirmis to the Zinc untile Rising Gas Yse Vigorously Evolved', but never added 'Don't Doe Thys Atte Home' or even 'And Say Fare-thee-Welle to Thy Eyebrows'.


"Throne vacant, applicant must supply own crown"


There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.


'Uniforms is okay. Adds a bit of tone, in fact. Especially if you look dashing,' he said, ignoring the evidence that Nobby was, in fact, merely runny.


[The] streams [...] were now used for those purposes to which humanity had always put clean fresh water; i.e., making it as turbid and undrinkable as possible.


Fire escapes were unknown in Ankh-Morpork and the flames generally had to leave via the roof.


He was no longer interested in getting close to the soil because he'd been as close to the soil as it was possible to get and the soil, it turned out, was just dirt.


As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus.


Usually the speakers dealt with all kinds of subjects, many of them on the cusp of sanity or somewhere in the peaceful valleys on the other side.


Vimes's grin was as funny as the one that moves very fast towards drowning men. And has a fin on top. 


'Why are our people going out there?'
 
'Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and... additional wealth in a new land,'

'What's in it for the Klatchians?'

'Oh, they've gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for nothing.'


'The problem with mercenaries,' said the Patrician, 'is that they need to be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up paying them even more to stop.'


Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.


A few years ago you could count the Watch on the fingers of a blind butcher's hand


'Well, we shall miss you, Willikins.'
Others may not, he thought. Especially if they have time for a second shot.


It wasn't proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren't doing.


'You're thinking something, sir. Aren't you?'
 
'It is a use to which I occasionally put my brain, captain. Strange as it may seem.'


It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.


Rust stopped to think again. He had the look of a lawnmower just after the grass has organized a workers' collective.


'I meant, have you ploughed the ocean waves at all?'

Colon gave him a cunning look.

'Ah, you can't catch me with that one, sir,' he said. 'Everyone knows the horses sink.'


He'd probably spent long evenings in his tent, looking up in the dictionary short words beginning with V and trying them out... Veni, vermini, vomui?  Visi, veneri, vamoosi?


People were milling about on deck in the manner peculiar to non-sailors on board ship, not sure of what they should be doing or where they should refrain from doing it.


The food was... dog food. In Ankh-Morpork terms, it meant something that you wouldn't even put in a sausage, and there are very few things that a man with a big enough mincer cannot put in a sausage.


The only attempt ever to set up a printing press in Ankh-Morpork had ended in a mysterious fire and the death by suicide of the luckless printer. Everyone knew it was suicide because he'd left a note. The fact that this had been engraved on the head of a pin was considered an irrelevant detail.


Apart from that - and a silver collar on a werewolf was a fairly major that - she'd been treated well.


He tried to look on the bright side. What was the main reason why he hated boats? The fact that they sank, right? But this one had the sinking built in right from the start And you didn't have to watch the waves going up and down, because they were already above you.


She was aware that she had a slight advantage over male werewolves in that naked women caused fewer complaints, although the downside was that they got some pressing invitations. Some kind of covering was essential, for modesty and the prevention of inconvenient bouncing, which was why fashioning impromptu clothes out of anything to hand was a lesser-known werewolf skill.


In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.


Only Carrot could whisper like that. He associated whispering with concealment and untruth and compromised by whispering very loudly.


'Our very lives depend on your appearing to be a stupid fat idiot,'

'I ain't very good at acting, sir.'

'Good!'


Vimes had to open his mouth because otherwise there was no room to get his head around such a crazy idea.


He believed, along with General Tacticus, that courage, bravery and the indomitable human spirit were fine things which nevertheless tended to take second place to the combination of courage, bravery, the indomitable human spirit and a six-to-one superiority of numbers.


'It's dragging the good name of Ankh-Morpork in the mud.'

'For Ankh-Morpork, mud is up.'


Old Stoneface would turn in all five of his graves.


And remember I know when you tell me lies. Your lips move.


'Are you using some kind of aft-' - he corrected himself - 'some kind of insteadofshave, Nobby?'


It wasn't that they didn't take an interest in the world around them. On the contrary, they had a deep, personal and passionate involvement in it, but instead of asking, 'Why are we here?' they asked, 'Is it going to rain before the harvest?'
A philosopher might have deplored this lack of mental ambition, but only if he was really certain about where his next meal was coming from.


In Ghat they believe, in vampire watermelons, although folklore is silent about what they believe about vampire watermelons. Possibly they suck back.


They thought you could see life through books but you couldn't, the reason being that the words got in the way.


Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.


A bloody good grudge, Lancre reckoned, was like a fine old wine. You looked after it carefully and left it to your children.


'It wasn't holy [water] at all! It was strongly diluted. Mildly devout at worst.'


The man with her hadn't been a witch, but his manner fitted him into that class of people Hodgesaargh mentally pigeonholed as 'my betters', although in truth this was quite a large category. He wasn't about to disagree with his betters. Hodgesaargh was a one-man feudal system.


They regarded the bridge. It had a certain negative quality. That is to say, while it was possible at the limits of probability that if they tried to cross the chasm by walking out over thin air this might just work - because of sudden up draughts, or air molecules suddenly all having a crazy idea at the same time - trying to do the same thing via the bridge would clearly be laughable.


The [bridge] would have been called primitive even by people who were too primitive to have a word yet for 'primitive'.


She looked down. She didn't want to, but it was a direction occupying a lot of the world.


Agnes looked hard at the pixie. On a scale of ethereal from one to ten he looked as if he was on some other scale, probably one buried in deep ocean sludge. The blueness of his skin, she could see now, was made up of tattoos and paint.


'Amazin' how they can just fade into the foreground like that,' said Nanny. 'That's what's kept 'em so safe all these years. That and killin' most people who saw 'em, of course.'


Agnes couldn't speak. Her life passing in front of her eyes one way had met it passing in front of her eyes going in the opposite direction, and words would fail her now until she could decide when now was.


The Lancrastians [reckone] in their uncomplicated country way that it was bad luck to have your head torn off by a vengeful underground spirit.


She seemed drunk, at that stage when hitherto unconsidered things seem a good idea, like another drink.


There was even a bit of sullen thunder now, not the outgoing sort that cracks the sky but the other sort, which hangs around the horizons and gossips nastily with other storms.


When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.


The door creaked open. It was a long, tortured, groaning noise: In fact there was more creak than door, and it went on just a few seconds after the door had stopped.


The old chieftains of Lancre reckoned to be buried with their weapons in order to fight their enemies in the next world, and since you didn't become a chieftain of ancient Lancre without sending a great many enemies to the next world, they liked to take weapons that could be relied upon to last.


He found a section headed 'What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not', but since the first sentence read 'Endeavour to be the one inside' he'd rather lost heart.


Granny Weatherwax had a primal snore. It had never been tamed. No one had ever had to sleep next to it, to curb its wilder excesses by means of a kick, a prod in the small of the back or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had years in a lonely bedroom to perfect the knark, the graaah and the gnoc, gnoc, gnoc unimpeded by the nudges, jabs and occasional attempts at murder that usually moderate the snore impulse over time.


It is in the nature of the universe that the person who always keeps you waiting ten minutes will, on the day you are ten minutes tardy, have been ready ten minutes early and will make a point of [i]not mentioning this[/i].


Her general stance indicated that she was, in the specialized patois of the area, a lady-in-waiting. To be more precise, a lady-in-waiting for Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Right Amount.


'I mean... well, you know what people call men who wear wigs and gowns, don't you?'
'Yes, miss.'
'You do?'
'Yes, miss. Lawyers, miss


It was mostly unexplored.  At least by proper explorers. Just living there doesn't count.


Many of [the dwarves] wouldn't know a pick-axe if you hit them with it. At least, if you hit them hard enough.


It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren't the people the people who made up the phrase 'people are people everywhere' had traditionally thought of as people


The Baron was a large, red-faced man, insofar as a face could be seen under the beard, hair, moustache and eyebrows, which were engaged in a bitter four-way war over the remaining areas of bare skin.


The way [Reg the zombie] saw it, dying was really just a career change. Been there, done that, worn the shroud... And then you got over it and got on with your life. Of course, he knew that many people didn't, for some reason, but he thought of them as not prepared to make the effort.


The tottering piles of paperwork on the desk were slightly less alpine than yesterday. There were even occasional patches of desktop.


He was so far out of his depth that the fish had lights on their noses.


There were not like the city walls of Ankh-Morpork, which had become at first a barrier to expansion and then a source of masonry for it.


Dwarfs are very argumentative, sir. Of course, many wouldn't agree.


It was definitely an evening dress. You couldn't get away with it in daylight.


Best to start with the first rule of policing: suspect the victim. Vimes wasn't quite sure who the victim was here, though. So suspect the witness. That was another good rule


One day, when he was naughty, Mr Bunnsy looked over the hedge into Farmer Fred's field and it was full of green lettuces. Mr Bunnsy, however, was not full of lettuces. This did not seem fair.


Humans are so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.


She thought that it was no good looking inconspicuous unless people could see that you were being inconspicuous.


A sudden door in the wall completely failed to happen.


He wasn't exactly lost, because cats never got lost. He merely didn't know where everything else was.


Don't talk to me about gold plates - if you can see what the plate is made of the portions are too small.


No one can say I'm not prepared to go that extra meal.


It's amazing what you can do with a little charm and a lot of blackmail.


Dwarf cookery deserves a place of its own, probably as a boat anchor.


They are a real treat for anyone whose favourite food group is Burnt Crunchy Bits.


By the time they got all the way up to Lancre, in the mountains, the fish were high in more ways than one and a good cook would try all sorts of ideas to disguise the flavour.


No visit to Ankh-Morpork is complete without a taste of one of Mr Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler's famous pies or sausages-in-a-bun. Then it is sometimes completed very, very quickly.


Folklore says the best way to turn [dwarf scones] into a meal is to soak them in a bucket of water for a week, and then eat the bucket.


When receiving visitors, wizards expect a present of cake. In return, when wizards visit you, they bring an appetite.


'Some big houses now boast a set of clockwork spaghetti forks, which can reduce the effort required.'


'Apparently there's something called a snail fork, but I don't see how they could hold one.'


He made part of his living by renting out the rat's nest of old sheds and cellars that backed on to the pub. They tended to be occupied very temporarily by the kind of enthusiastic manufacturer who believed that what the world really, really needed today was an inflatable dartboard.


There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: 'What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!


William's father, during their last meeting, had gone on at some length about the proud and noble traditions of the de Wordes. These had mostly involved unpleasant deaths, preferably of foreigners, but somehow, William gathered, the de Wordes had always considered that it was a decent second prize to die themselves.


Three indeeds used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break.


There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent.


Both gods and magic required solid, sensible men, and the brothers Ridcully were solid as rocks. And, in some respects, as sensible.


In dealings with the dwarfs I have seen to it that the city's hand of friendship is permanently outstretched in a slightly downward direction.


'I'm sure no one could call me a despot, your reverence,'
'Not twice at any rate.'


'My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.'

Hughnon reflected that 'entirely transparent' meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn't see them at all.


'Look out of the window. Tell me what you see!'
'Fog,' said the Chief Priest.
Vetinari sighed. Sometimes the weather had no sense of narrative convenience.


He could not exactly recall much more than that at the moment, due to memory loss brought on by lack of money.


A life of steak tartare wasn't too bad if you compared it with a death of stake au naturelle.


As far as he could see everything about the man could be prefaced by the word 'badly', as in -spoken, -educated and -in need of a drink.


It wasn't that he wore bad clothes. He just seemed to generate an internal scruffiness field. The man could rumple a helmet.


Don't worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn't any more.'
'What changed her mind?'
'I reckon it was the dying that did it.'


Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.


All in all, the effect was not of a poodle but of malformed poodleosity. That is to say, everything about it suggested 'poodle' except for the whole thing itself, which suggested walking away.


Rocky was supplying some sports news, and while it was unreadable to William he put it in[to the newspaper] on the basis that anyone keen on sport probably couldn't read.


They appeared to be men who simply wanted to help lost horses, and take them home and make them better. If this had to mean dyeing areas of their coats and swearing blind they'd owned them for the past two years, then so be it.


Nanny had nothing against witches being married. She herself had had many husbands and had even been married to 3 of them.


It's hard to contemplate, in the grey hours of the night, that the only reason that people would come to your funeral would be to make sure you're dead.


'The system is that we promise to pay taxes if the city ever asks us to, provided the city promises never to ask us, sir.'


His movements could be called catlike, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.


'I have... business interests in Uberwald.'
'Right. I see,' said Vimes. 'And you'd like to have the significant pause type of business interests in Ankh-Morpork, I expect.'


YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE.


He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.


Crowley 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.


It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight. And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs. CHOW was the ultimate diet food.


Newt was very aware that a woman was sitting next to him. Be professional, he told himself. You're a soldier, aren't you? Well, practically. Then act like a soldier. He thought hard for a fraction of a second. Well, act like a respectable soldier on his best behavior, then.


Newt had indeed been harboring certain thoughts about Anathema; not just harboring them, in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint and scraping the barnacles off their bottom.


He was one of those people who didn't have a waist. He had an equator.


Moist signed again. After all, what would it matter in the long run? And it would certainly be a long run, if he couldn't find a horse.


Moist looked around the room. Did it appear smaller? Did the shadows deepen and lengthen? Was there a sudden cold sensation in the air? No, there wasn't. But an opportunity had definitely been missed, Moist felt.


What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.


Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow.


A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least they could tell the people he was their fault.


Most of the financiers settled a little more easily in their chairs. The man was clearly a fool about business matters. What did he know about compound interest, eh? He'd been classically educated. And then they remembered his education had been at the Assassins' Guild School, and stopped smiling.


'I expect the dogs was borrowed off of him. He turns 'em loose in his yards at night.'
'No burglar gets in, eh?'
'I think he's quite happy if they get in, sir. Saves having to feed the dogs.'


'I have to hand it to you, Mr Lipwig, taking on a job that has killed four men before you. It takes a special kind of man to do that.'
Yes, thought Moist. An [i]ignorant[/i] one.


And then it occurred to one or two of the board that the jovial 'my friends' in the mouth of Reacher Gilt, so generous with his invitations, his little tips, his advice and his champagne, was beginning, in its harmonics and overtones, to sound just like the word 'pal' in the mouth of a man in an alley who was offering cosmetic surgery with a broken bottle in exchange for not being given any money.


He wasn't interested in machinery; he thought of a spanner as something which had another person holding it.


But in truth it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there for ever provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as Finance.


Standing around watching people was, of course, Ankh-Morpork's leading industry. The place was a net exporter of penetrating stares.


Most dwarfs were model citizens, even at two-thirds scale.


Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts.  Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns  went off and slaughtered their fellow  pawns while the kings lounged about  doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked  the rooks round, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves.


He often fell into bad company, he reflected, although sometimes he had to look all day to find it.


It was cold and quiet, except for the ticking of a clock on the wall. Both the hands had fallen off the clock face, and lay at the bottom of the glass cover, so while the clock was still measuring time it wasn't inclined to tell anyone about it.


Coachmen met most of their thieves out on lonely roads, where the highwaymen seldom bothered to ask sissy questions like 'Your money or your life?'
When one was caught, justice and vengeance were happily combined by means of a handy length of lead pipe.


The post of Master of the Mint was a sinecure handed to a drinking pal of the current king or patrician, who used it as a money box and did nothing more than turn up now and again with a big sack, a hangover and a meaningful look.


'I take a keen interest in the criminal mind,' said Moist, slightly faster than he'd intended. It was true. You just needed a talent for introspection.


'I know exactly what you never said. You refrained from saying it very loudly.'


'Look, banking is supposed to be dull! Numbers, pensions, a job for life!'
'For life possibly, but apparently not for long,'


This march was against the employment of golems, who uncomplainingly did the dirtiest jobs, worked around the clock, and were so honest they paid their taxes. But they weren't human and they had glowing eyes, and people could get touchy about that sort of thing.


'It's the kind of mistake amateurs always make!'
'You mean there's people who commit suicide professionally?'


And we talked to some of the lads from the Post Office last night and they said we could trust Mr Lipwig's word 'cos he's as straight as a corkscrew.'


It was lunchtime at Unseen University, where every meal is important. It was hard to find a time when some meal or other was not in progress there.


'The Arts are not my field,' he added, in a way that suggested his was a pretty superior field with much better flowers in it.


'Sheep's head?' said Moist gloomily. 'You know I hate food that stares back. I won't even look a sardine in the face.'
'He promised to blindfold it.'


A smile played around Cosmo's lips, which was a dangerous playground for anything as innocent as a smile.


Lockpicks, as Moist knew, were technically not illegal. Owning them was fine. Owning them while standing in someone else's house was not fine. Owning them while being found in a stricken bank vault was so far from fine it could see the curvature of the universe


"Blessings be upon this house," said Granny, but in a voice that suggested that if blessings needed to be taken away, she could do that, too.


Your own brains ought to have the decency to be on your side.


Some witches could sleep on a broomstick, but she didn't dare try in case she dreamed she was falling and woke up to find that it was true but soon wouldn't be.


Farther along the path was what was probably a demon. It had a horrible face, with so many fangs that some of them must have been just for show. There were wings, too, but they couldn't possibly have lifted it. It had found a piece of mirror, and every few seconds it took a peep into it and shuddered.


All that cats were bred for, in fact, was general catness.


Cats have a way of always having been there even if they've only just arrived. They, move in their own personal time. They act as if the human world is one they just happened to have stopped off in, on their way to somewhere that is possibly a whole lot more interesting.


The theory is that a well-fed cat is better at hunting than a hungry one. The reasoning is that a plump and full cat will be more content to lie in wait for the things that need guile and patience to catch - dragonflies, frogs, robins, that sort of thing - while a hungry one will merely dash about the place filling up on ordinary rats and mice. It's not certain who first advanced this view, but it's an evens bet that they probably had fur and whiskers.


Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need go.


The books will tell you that cats evolved from civet ancestors about 45 million years ago, which was definitely a good start. Get as much distance between yourself and the civets as possible, that was the motto of the early cats.


Cats make ideal time travellers because they can't handle guns. This makes the major drawback of time travel - that you might accidentally shoot your own grandfather - very unlikely. Of course, you might try to become your own grandfather, but having watched a family of farm cats, we can tell you that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a cat.


It would have been nice if she'd heard thousands of little voices fading away as the cloud of dust was scattered to the wind, but to her regret she didn't. Reality so often fails when it comes to small, satisfying details, she thought.


He was irreplaceable, just like every other Candle Knave before him.


Nutt was young and as such did not have that reverence for age that is had by, mostly, the aged.


There is a phrase 'neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring'. This thing was all of them, plus some other bits of beasts unknown to science or nightmare or even kebab.


Each wizard was being carried piggy-back by a stout bowler-hatted university porter, whom he was urging onward by means of a bottle of beer on a string held, as tradition demanded, ahead of the porter's grasp on a long stick.


Strictly speaking, Dr Hix, spelled with an X, was the son of Mr and Mrs Hicks, but a man who wears a black robe with nasty symbols on it and has a skull ring would be mad, or let us say even madder, to pass up the chance to have an X in his name.


Mrs Whitlow [...] generally took great care to select staff who, while being female, were not excessively so.


Ponder plunged on, because when you have dived off a cliff your only hope is to press for the abolition of gravity.


Ridcully swayed backwards, like a man subjected to an attack by a hitherto comatose sheep.


She had some sort of... relationship with Vetinari. Everyone knew it, and that was all everyone knew. A dot dot dot relationship. One of those. And nobody had been able to join up the dots.


Oh, well. Cometh the hour, cometh the... whatever. General comethness, perhaps.


Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out.


'You two have a history, I think.'
'Yeah, I suppose it was a history. I wanted it to be more of a geography, but she kept slappin' my hand.'


It was hard to argue with a man who insisted that he was not dead.


The laws of favours are amongst the most fundamental in the multiverse. The first law is: nobody asks for just one favour; the second request (after the granting of the first favour), prefaced by 'and can I be really cheeky?' is the asking of the second favour. If the aforesaid second request is not granted, the second law ensures that the need for any gratitude for the first favour is nullified, and in accordance with the third law the favour giver has not done any favours at all, and the favour field collapses.


I have got goods for sale and the customer has got money. I should have the money and, regrettably, that involves the customer having my goods.


Dwarf shops were doing well these days, largely because they understood the first rule of merchandising, which is this: I have got goods for sale and the customer has got money. I should have the money and, regrettably, that involves the customer having my goods. To this end, therefore, I will not say 'The one in the window is the last one we have, and we can't sell it to you, because if we did no one would know we have them for sale', or 'We'll probably have some more on Wednesday', or 'We just can't keep them on the shelves', or 'I'm fed up with telling people there's no demand for them' I will make a sale by any means short of physical violence, because without one I am a waste of space.


'Here we are, Mister Nutt, still warm,' said Glang, arriving from the back of the shop holding something that looked like something taken from an animal that was now, you hoped for its own sake, dead.


'And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'


'If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'


Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.


Two other figures sprang from the coach, cursing in language that was as colorful as the night was dark and even dirtier.


Dodger had read the face of Charlie twice now, and so he knew that Charlie had little liking for the doctor any more than the doctor did for Dodger and, from his tone, Charlie would be more inclined to put his trust in good food and water than in God—a personage who Dodger had only vaguely heard of and knew very little about, except perhaps that He had a lot to do with rich people.


The place to do a bit of rubbing now would be the Baron of Beef, or the Goat and Sixpence, or any of the less salubrious drinking establishments around the docks where you could get drunk for sixpence, dead drunk for a shilling, and possibly just dead for being so stupid as to step inside in the first place.


"Can you lend us a shilling? I'll pay you on Saint Never's Day!"


Mary-Go-Round sniffed again and said, "Gent tried to ply me with liquor once, but he ran out of money and I took most of what he had left when he fell asleep. Finest watch and chain I ever pinched."


At this point Dodger was treated to a wonderful bit of street theater, which with barely a word being spoken went in three acts, the first being: "I don't know nuffin'," and the next, "I never saw nuffin'," and finally that old favorite, "I never done nuffin'," followed at no extra cost by an encore, which was that tried and tested old chestnut, "I wasn't there."


But then Messy Bessie's big round features seemed to shift as she struggled with the concept of something unusual, such as a thought.


"Well, I thought to myself, if that is the self-same young man I met the other day, then the only way he would stop anything being stolen would be to put his hands behind his back."


This left something to be desired, possibly everything.


Dodger let a little silence reign and then forced it to abdicate.


Any intruder who came in with malice aforethought would wish they had never been born, or perhaps if they were able to think more selectively, that I had never been born.


They were getting the art of putting the knot in the rope in such a way that the neck was broken instantly, which saved a lot of hanging around for all concerned and meant that people no longer had to rely on their friends swinging on their heels as they danced the hemp fandango.


This is a matter of pride, Dodger, which I have and you must acquire.


A knife at your neck is a great encouragement to careful thinking.


People thought that a ragged face was a sign of a professional boxer, but it wasn't—it was a sign of an amateur boxer. Good boxers liked to be pretty; it put the contenders off their guard.


Mmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless—people being who they are—don't want to know.


He worked fast and methodically and everything was wrapped up in its own little velvet bag, within the main bundle, so that nothing would ever go clink just at the wrong moment because if there was a clink then the clink was where you spent your days until they hanged you.


If you were the kind of person who would come seeking more definite information about her activities, you were the kind of person who was likely soon to be inspecting the Thames bridges from underneath.