# NetHack 3.6.0 tribute to:
#
#         Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett
#              April 28, 1948 - March 12, 2015
# ("or until the ripples he caused in the world die away...")
#
#
%section books
#
#
#
%title The Colour of Magic  (2)
%passage 1
It has been remarked before that those who are sensitive to radiation in
the far octarine - the eighth colour, the pigment of the Imagination - can
see things that others cannot.

Thus it was that Rincewind, hurrying through the crowded, flare-lit,
evening bazarrs of Morpork with the Luggage trundling behind him, jostled a
tall figure, turned to deliver a few suitable curses, and beheld Death.

It had to be Death.  No-one else went around with empty eye sockets and, of
course, the scythe over one shoulder was another clue.

  [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage 1
%passage 2
As he was drawn towards the Eye the terror-struck Rincewind raised the box
protectively, and at the same time heard the picture imp say, 'They're
about ripe now, can't hold them any longer.  Every-one smile, please.'

There was a -
- flash of light so white and so bright - 
- it didn't seem like light at all.

Bel-Shamharoth screamed, a sound that started in the far ultrasonic and
finished somewhere in Rincewind's bowels.  The tentacles went momentarily
as stiff as rods, hurling their various cargos around the room, before
bunching up protectively in front of the abused Eye.  The whole mass
dropped into the pit and a moment later the big slab was snatched up by
several dozen tentacles and slammed into place, leaving a number of
thrashing limbs trapped around the edge.

  [The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage 2
%e title
#
#
#
%title The Light Fantastic (2)
%passage 1
'Cohen is my name, boy' Belthan's hands stopped moving.
'Cohen?' she said, 'Cohen the Barbarian?'
'The very shame.'
'Hang on, hang on,' said Rincewind, 'Cohen's a great big chap, neck like a
bull, got chest muscles like a sack of footballs.  I mean, he's the Disc's
greatest warrior, a legend in his own lifetime.  I remember my grandad
telling me he saw him ... my grandad telling me he ... my grandad ...'
He faltered under the gimlit gaze.
'Oh,' he said, 'Oh. Of course, Sorry.'
'Yesh,' said Cohen, and sighed, 'Thatsh right boy, I'm a lifetime in my own
legend.'

  [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage 1
%passage 2
Death sat at one side of a black baize table in the entre of the room,
arguing with Famine, War and Pestilence.  Twoflower was the only one to
look up and notice Rincewind.
'Hey, how did you get here?' he said.
'Well, some say that the creator took a handful - oh, I see, well, it's
hard to explain but I -'
'Have you got the Luggage?'
The wooden box pushed past Rincewind and settled down in front of its
owner, who opened its lid and rummaged around inside until he came up with
a small, leatherbound book which he handed to War, who was hammering the
table with a mailed fist.
'It's "Nosehinger on the Laws of Contract",' he said. 'It's quite good,
there's a lot in it about double finessing and how to -'
Death snatched the book with a bony hand and flipped through the pages, 
quite oblivious to the presence of the two men.
'RIGHT,' he said, 'PESTILENCE, OPEN ANOTHER PACK OF CARDS. I'M GOING TO GET
TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS IF IT KILLS ME. FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING OF COURSE.'

  [The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage 2
%e title
#
#
#
%title Equal Rites (3)
%passage 1
...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that 
what you're attempting can't be done.

  [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.

  [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 3
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time
dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits 
they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly 
expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, 
and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives 
it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never
tries to walk and chew gum at the same time. 

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things 
around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens
of biological calendars and timepieces. There's thoughts about to be said,
and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and 
a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is 
a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. 
It is a complete FM waveband- and some of those stations aren't reputable,
they're outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with
limbic lyrics.

  [Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Mort (1)
%passage 1
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and hand ended up
 with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was
the Man; he had the Vote. 

  [Mort, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Sourcery (2)
%passage 1
And what would humans be without love?
RARE, said Death.

  [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. 
They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the
attempt,  and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in
the attempt. 

  [Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Wyrd Sisters (2)
%passage 1

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls
them. It's the other way around. 

  [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
#submitted by Boudewijn
Verence tried to avoid walking through walls. A man had his dignity.
He became aware that he was being watched.
He turned his head.
There was a cat sitting in the doorway, subjecting him to a slow blink.
It was a mottled grey and extremely fat...
No. It was extremely /big/. It was covered with so much scar tissue 
that it looked like a fist with fur on it. Its ears were a couple of
perforated stubs, its eyes two yellow slits of easy-going malevolence,
its tail a twitching series of question marks as it stared at him.
Greebo had heard that Lady Felmet had a small white female cat and had
strolled up to pay his respects. Verence had never seen an animal with
so much built-in villainy. He didn't resist as it waddled across the
floor and dried to rub itself against his legs, purring like a 
waterfall.

'Well, well,' said the king, vaguely. He reached down and made an 
effort to scratch it behind the two ragged bits on top of its head. 
It was a relief to find someone else besides another ghost who could 
see him, and Greebo, he couldn't help feeling, was a distinctly unusual
cat. Most of the castle cats were either pampered pets or flat-eared 
kitchen and stable habitues who generally resembled the very rodents
they lived on. This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All 
cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless 
animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures, 
Greebo radiated genuime intelligence. He also radiated a smell that 
would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox. 

  [Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Pyramids (2)
%passage 1
The trouble with life was that you didn't get a chance to practice before
doing it for real. 

  [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a
human being to be really stupid. 

  [Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Guards! Guards! (2)
%passage 1
Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself.
The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that. 

  [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
These weren't encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a
longbow's arrow could send it  through an innocent bystander a hundred
yards away instead of the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed. 

  [Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Eric (2)
%passage 1
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, /technically/ they had, quite
 often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the
 puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they didn't own their
 own horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another
minority group with its own graffiti and food shops. 

  [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
Rincewind looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were
 something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The
 one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best.
The next one was: I Thought You'd Like It.
Eric was standing on: For The Sake Of The Children.
'Weird, isn't it?' he said. 'Why do it like this?'
'I think they're meant to be good intentions,' said Rincewind. This was a
road to hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists. 

  [Eric, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Moving Pictures (4)
%passage 1
This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier.
(Except that of course you can't have a /final/ frontier, because there'd
 be nothing for it to be a frontier /to/, but as frontiers go, it's pretty
penultimate...) 

  [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered
so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold. 

  [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 3
There was a dog sitting by his feet.
It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically grey but with patches of
brown, white, and black in outlying areas...   It looked up slowly, and
said 'Woof?'   Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have
 been a trick of an echo, or something. It wasn't that the dog had gone
 'woof!', although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the
 universe /never/ went 'woof!', they had complicated barks like 'whuuugh!'
 and 'hwhoouf!'. No, it was that it hadn't in fact /barked/ at all. It had
/said/ 'woof'.   'Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said "miaow".'

  [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 4
''Twas beauty killed the beast,' said the Dean, who liked to say things
like that.   'No it wasn't,' said the Chair. 'It was it splatting into the
ground like that.' 

  [Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Reaper Man (4)
%passage 1
No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die
away...

  [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

  [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 3
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how
 fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and
is waiting for it. 

  [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 4
"That's not fair, you know. If we knew when we were going to die, people
would lead better lives." 

IF PEOPLE KNEW WHEN THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, I THINK THEY PROBABLY WOULDN'T
LIVE AT ALL. 

  [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Witches Abroad (1)
%passage 1
Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never
managed it from the cat.

  [Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Small Gods (12)
%passage 1
He says gods like to see an atheist around.  Gives them something to aim at.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
Pets are always a great help in times of stress.  And in times of starvation
too, o'course.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 3 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
So history has its caretakers.

They live ... well, in the nature of things they live wherever they are
sent, but their /spiritual/ home is in a hidden valley in the high Ramtops
of the Discworld, where the books of history are kept.

These aren't books in which the events of the past are pinned like so many
butterflies to a cork.  These are the books from which history in derived.
There are more than twenty thousand of them, each one is ten feet high,
bound in lead, and the letters are so small that they have to be read with
a magnifying glass.

When people say "It is written ..." it is written /here/.

There are fewer metaphors than people think.

Every month the abbot and two senior monks go into the cave where the
books are kept.  It used to be the duty of the abbot alone, but two other
reliable monks were included after the unfortunate case of the 59th Abbot,
who made a million dollars in small bets before his fellow monks caught up
with him.

Besides, it's dangerous to go in alone.  The sheer concentratedness of
History, sleeting past soundlessly out into the world, can be overwhelming.
Time is a drug.  Too much of it kills you.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 4-5
%passage 4
It was the Year of the Notional Serpent, or two hundred years after the
Declaration of the Prophet Abbys.

Which meant that the time of the 8th Prophet was imminent.

That was the reliable thing about the Church of the Great God Om.  It had
very punctual prophets.  You could set your calendar by them, if you had
one big enough.

And, as is generally the case around the time a prophet is expected, the
Church redoubled its efforts to be holy.  This was very much like the
bustle you get in any large concern when the auditors are expected, but
tended towards taking people suspected of being less holy and putting them
to death in a hundred ingenious ways.  This is considered a reliable
barometer of the state of one's piety in most of the really popular
religions.  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.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 60 ("he" is a tortoise, unnoticed among a large crowd of people)
%passage 5
He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet.  He had
no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly
because he was thinking.  Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the
same time.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 60 (same page as preceding passage)
%passage 6
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended
largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and
exactly how things should be.  After all, those who had achieved success
in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God,
because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His
/disapproval/.  In the same way, the Quisition could act without
possibility of flaw.  Suspicion was proof.  How could it be anything else?
The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds
of His exquisitors unless it was /right/ that it should be there.  Life
could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om.  And sometimes
quite short, too.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 92 ([sic] first paragraph ought to have fourth '.' to end sentence)
%passage 7
The memory stole over him:  a desert is what you think it is.  And now,
you can think clearly ...

There were no lies here.  All fancies fled away.  That's what happened in
all deserts.  It was just you, and what you believed.

What have I always believed?

That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not
according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent
and honest /inside/, then it would, in the end, more or less, turn out
all right.

You couldn't get that on a banner.  But the desert looked better already.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 114
%passage 8
Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick
as thin soup.  Brutha knocked.

"Enter."(1)

(1) Words are the litmus paper of the mind.  If you find yourself in the
power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go
somewhere else very quickly.  But if they say "Enter," don't stop to pack.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 141 (at the end, Xeno is almost certainly agreeing with Ibid, but
#         he /might/ be answering Brutha's last question)
%passage 9
"Are you all philosophers?" said Brutha.

The one called Xeno stepped forward, adjusting the hang of his toga.

"That's right," he said.  "We're philosophers.  We think, therefore we am."

"Are," said the luckless paradox manufacturer automatically.

Xeno spun around.  "I've just about had it up to /here/ with you, Ibid!" he
roared.  He turned back to Brutha.  "We /are/, therefore we am," he said
confidently.  "That's it."

Several of the philosophers looked at one another with interest.

"That's actually quite interesting," one said.  "The evidence of our
existence is the /fact/ of our existence, is that what you're saying?"

"Shut up," said Xeno, without looking around.

"Have you been fighting?" said Brutha.

The assembled philosophers assumed various expressions of shock and horror.

"Fighting?  Us?  We're /philosophers/," said Ibid, shocked.

"My word, yes," said Xeno.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 151
%passage 10
All over the world there were rulers with titles like the Exalted, the
Supreme, and Lord High Something or Other.  Only in one small country was
the ruler elected by the people, who could remove him whenever they
wanted--and they called him the Tyrant.

The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote.(1)  Every five
years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he
was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy.  Immediately after he
was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal
madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher
in the street looking for a towel.  And then five years later they elected
another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent
people kept on making the same mistakes.

(1) Provided that we wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of
being mad, frivolous, or a woman.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 239
%passage 11
"I still don't see how one god can be a hundred different thunder gods.
They all look different ..."

"False noses."

"What?"

"And different voices.  I happen to know Io's got seventy different hammers.
Not common knowledge, that.  And it's just the same with mother goddesses.
There's only one of 'em.  She just got a lot of wigs and of course it's
amazing what you can do with a padded bra."

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 265
%passage 12
An hour later the lion, who was limping after Brutha, also arrived at the
grave.  It had lived in the desert for sixteen years, and the reason it had
lived so long was that it had not died, and it had not died because it
never wasted handy protein.  It dug.

Humans have always wasted handy protein ever since they started wondering
who had lived in it.

But, on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion.

  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Lords and Ladies (12)
# p. 122 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 1
Elves are wonderful.  They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous.  They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic.  They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous.  They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting.  They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific.  They beget terror.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake,
and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have
changed their meaning.

No one ever said elves are nice.

Elves are bad.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 32
%passage 2
"Hope she does all right as queen," said Nanny.

"We taught her everything she knows," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Yeah," said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken.  "D'you
think... maybe... ?"

"What?"

"D'you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything /we/ know?"

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 36
%passage 3
It was very hard, being a reader in Invisible Writings.(1)

(1) The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by
the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space.  The thaumic
mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books,
everywhere, affect all other books.  This is obvious:  books inspire
other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past.
But the General Theory(2) of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the
contents of books /as yet unwritten/ can be deduced from books now in
existence.

(2) There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much
because it's self-evidently a load of marsh gas.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 51
%passage 4
"Don't hold with schools," said Granny Weatherwax.  "They get in the way
of education.  All them books.  Books?  What good are they?  There's too
much reading these days.  We never had time to read when we was young, I
know that."

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 79-80
%passage 5
The highwayman stepped over the groaning body of the driver and marched
toward the door of the coach, dragging his stepladder behind him.

He opened the door.

"Your money or, I'm sorry to say, your--"

A blast of octarine fire blew his hat off.

The dwarf's expression did not change.

"I wonder if I might be allowed to rephrase my demands?"

Ridcully looked the elegantly dressed stranger up and down, or rather
down and further down.

"You don't look like a dwarf," he said, "apart from the height, that is."

"Don't look like a dwarf apart from the height?"

I mean, the helmet and iron boots department is among those you are lacking
in," said Ridcully.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 95
%passage 6
What is magic?

There is the wizards' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on
the age of the wizard.  Older wizards talk about candles, circles, planets,
stars, bananas, chants, runes, and the importance of having at least four
good meals every day.  Younger wizards, particularly the pale ones who
spend most of their time in the High Energy Magic building,(1) chatter at
length about fluxes in the morphic nature of the universe, the essentially
impermanent quality of even the most apparently rigid time-space framework,
the impossibility of reality, and so on:  what this means is that they have
got hold of something hot and are gabbling the physics as they go along.

(1) It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest
possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to made up of
/resons/(2) or reality fragments.  Currently research indicates that each
reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five "flavors,"
known as "up," "down," "sideways," "sex appeal," and "peppermint."

(2) Lit: "Thing-ies."

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 107
%passage 7
What is magic?

Then there is the witches' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending
on the age of the witch.  Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but
may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn't know what the
hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities,
and could become any of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty
was inserted in the crack and /twisted/; that, if you really had to make
someone's hat explode, all you needed to do was /twist/ into the universe
where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce
off in different directions.

Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe
it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers
on.

Everyone may to right, all at the same time.  That's the thing about
quantum.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 114; 'colorful' & 'humor' are spelled the American way, 'or' not 'our'
%passage 8
He knocked on the coach door.  The window slid down.

"I wouldn't like you to think of this as a robbery," he said.  "I'd like
you to think of it more as a colorful anecdote you might enjoy telling your
grandchildren about."

A voice from within said, "That's him!  He stole my horse!"

A wizard's staff poked out.  The chieftain saw the knob on the end.

"Now then," he said pleasantly.  "I know the rules.  Wizards aren't allowed
to use magic against civilians except in genuine life-threatening situa--"

There was a burst of octarine light.

"Actually, it's not a rule," said Ridcully.  "It's more a guideline."  He
turned to Ponder Stibbons.  "Interestin' use of Stacklady's Morphic
Resonator here, I hoped you noticed."

Ponder lookd down.

The chieftain had been turned into a pumpkin, although, in accordance with
the rules of universal humor, he still had his hat on.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 149 (second half of a paragraph)
%passage 9
Things had to balance.  You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad
witch.  It never worked for long.  All you could try to be was a /witch/,
as hard as you could.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 162 (mid-paragraph)
%passage 10
"I'm the head wizard now.  I've only got to give an order and a thousand
wizards will... uh... disobey, come to think of it, or say 'What?', or
start to argue.  But they have to take notice.

"I've been to that University a few times," said Granny.  "A bunch of fat
old men in beards."

"That's right!  That's /them/!"

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 190
%passage 11
The window was no escape this time.  There was the bed to hide under, and
that'd work for all of two seconds, wouldn't it?

Her eye was drawn by some kind of horrible magic back to the room's
garderobe, lurking behind its curtain.

Margrat lifted the lid.  The shaft was definitely wide enough to admit a
body.  Garderobes were notorious in that respect.  Several unpopular kings
met their end, as it were, in the garderobe, at the hands of an assassin
with good climbing ability, a spear, and a fundamental approach to politics.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 191 ('a' historian, not 'an'; 'Ynci' is correct)
%passage 12
Some shape, some trick of moonlight, some expression on a painted face
somehow cut through her terror and caught her eye.

That was a portrait she'd never seen before.  She'd never walked down this
far.  The idiot vapidity of the assembled queens had depressed her.  But
this one...

Ths one, somehow, reached out to her.

She stopped.

It couldn't have been done from life.  In the days of /this/ queen, the
only paint known locally was a sort of blue, and generally used on the body.
But a few generations ago King Lully I had been a bit of a historian and a
romantic.  He'd researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and
where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions
of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom(1)
and extrapolated from associated sources(2).  He'd commissioned the
portrait of Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered, one of the founders of the
kingdom.

(1) Made it up.

(2) Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

  [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Men at Arms (14)
%passage 1
The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 6-7 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
Ankh-Morpork had a king again.

And this was /right/.  And it was /fate/ that let Edward recognize this
/just/ when he'd got his Plan.  And it was /right/ that it was /Fate/,
and the city would be /Saved/ from its ignoble present by its /glorius/
past.  He had the /Means/, and he had the /end/.  And so on ...
Edward's thoughts often ran like this.

He could think in /italics/.  Such people need watching.

Preferably from a safe distance.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 76-77
%passage 3
There were such things as dwarf gods.  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.  It takes a very special and strong-minded
kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their
other armpit and shout, "Oh, random fluctuations-in-the-space-time-
continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!"

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 119 (perhaps a bit subtle; it would be clearer if 'they' was italicized)
%passage 4
"It's an ancient tradition," said Carrot.

"I thought dwarfs didn't believe in devils and demons and stuff like
that."

"That's true, but ... we're not sure if they know."

"Oh."

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 168-169 (treacle == molasses)
%passage 5
"I'd like a couple of eggs," said Vimes, "with the yolks real hard but
the whites so runny that they drip like treacle.  And I want bacon, that
special bacon all covered with bony nodules and dangling bits of fat.
And a slice of fried bread.  The kind that makes your arteries go clang
just by looking at it."

"Tough order," said Harga.

"You managed it yesterday.  And give me some more coffee.  Black as
midnight on a moonless night."

Harga looked surprised.  That wasn't like Vimes.

"How black's that, then?" he said.

"Oh pretty damn black, I should think."

"Not necessarily."

"What?"

"You get more stars on a moonless night.  Stands to reason.  They show up
more.  It can be quite bright on a moonless night."

Vimes sighed.

"An /overcast/ moonless night?" he said.

Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.

"Cumulous or cirro-nimbus?"

"I'm sorry.  What did you say?"

"You gets city lights reflected off cumulous, because it's low lying, see.
Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in--"

"A moonless night," said Vimes, in a hollow voice, "that is as black as
that coffee."

"Right!"

"And a doughnut."  Vimes grabbed Harga's stained vest and pulled him
until they were nose to nose.  "A doughnut as doughnutty as a doughnut
made of flour, water, one large egg, sugar, a pinch of yeast, cinnamon
to taste and a jam, jelly, or rat filling depending on national or
species preference, OK?  Not as doughnutty as something in any way
metaphorical.  Just a doughnut.  One doughnut."

"A doughnut."

"Yes."

"You only had to say."

Harge brushed off his vest, gave Vimes a hurt look, and went back into
the kitchen.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 174 (clumsy wording; 'they' in 2nd sentence != 'they' in 1st sentence)
%passage 6
Why had they chased someone halfway across the city?  Because they'd
run away.  /No one/ ran away from the Watch.  Thieves just flashed their
licenses.  Unlicensed thieves had nothing to fear from the Watch, since
they'd saved up all their fear for the Thieves' Guild.  Assassins always
obeyed the letter of the law.  And honest men didn't run away from the
Watch.(1)  Running away from the Watch was downright suspicious.

(1) The axiom "Honest men have nothing to fear from the police" is
currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 176-177 ("this [sic; no 'is'] the pork futures warehouse")
%passage 7
"Oh, my," said Detritus.  "I think this the pork futures warehouse in
Morpork Road."

"What?"

"Used to work here," said the troll.  "Used to work everywhere.  Go away,
you stupid troll, you too thick," he added, gloomily.

"Is there any way out?"

"The main door is in Morpork Street.  But no one comes in here for months.
Till pork exists."(1)

Cuddy shivered.

(1) Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things
which only exist /in potentia/, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-
Morpork is a product of the Patrician's rules about baseless metaphors,
the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must
exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality
around Ankh, which is so thin that it's as thin as a very thin thing.
The net result is that trading in pork futures--in pork /that doesn't
exist yet/--led to the building of the warehouse to store it until it
does.  The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in
the temporal energy flow.  At least, that's what the wizards in the
High Energy Magic building say.  And they've got proper pointy hats and
letters after their name, so they know what they're talking about.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 212
%passage 8
Black mud, more or less dry, made a path at the bottom of the tunnel.
There was slime on the walls, too, indicating that at some point in the
recent past the tunnel had been full of water.  Here and there huge
patches of fungi, luminous with decay, cast a faint glow over the
ancient stonework.(1)

(1) It didn't need to.  Cuddy, belonging to a race that worked underground
for preference, and Detritus, a member of a race notoriously nocturnal,
had excellent vision in the dark.  But 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.  Strange but true.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 218
%passage 9
"He's bound to have done /something/," Noddy repeated.

In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment.  If
there was a 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.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 226
%passage 10
The librarian considered matters for a while.  So ... a dwarf and a troll.
He preferred both species to humans.  For one thing, neither of them were
great readers.  The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor 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.  He liked
people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in
the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature
intended them to be.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 253
%passage 11
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 265 (fyi, they're decorated chicken eggs)
%passage 12
"All those little heads ... "

They stretched away in the candlelight, shelf on shelf of them, tiny
little clown faces--as if a tribe of headhunters had suddenly developed
a sophisicated sense of humor and a desire to make the world a better
place.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 300-301
%passage 13
"You know what I mean!"

"Can't say I do.  Can't say I do.  Clothing has never been what you might
call a thingy of dog wossname."  Gaspode scratched his ear.  "Two meta-
syntactic variables there.  Sorry."

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 320
%passage 14
"Hahaha, a nice day for it!" leered the Bursar.

"Oh dear," said Ridcully, "he's off again.  Can't understand the man.
Anyone got the dried frog pills?"

It was a complete mystery to Mustrum Ridcully, a man designed by nature to
live outdoors and happily slaughter anything that coughed in the bushes,
why the Bursar (a man designed by Nature to sit in a small room somewhere,
adding up figures) was so nervous.  He'd tried all sorts of things to, as
he put it, buck him up.  These included practical jokes, surprise early
morning runs, and leaping out at him from behind doors while wearing
Willie the Vampire masks in order, he said, to take him out of himself.

  [Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Soul Music (11)
%passage 1
But this didn't feel like magic.  It felt a lot older than that.  It felt
like music.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
"Yes," said the skull.  "Quit while you're a head, that's what I say."

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p.2 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
But if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is
observed,(1) it's even more true that it changes the observer.

(1) Because of Quantum.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p.8
%passage 4
It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the
equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company
written on the side.  It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 63-64
%passage 5
Then the skull said:  "Kids today, eh?"

"I blame education," said the raven.

"A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing," said the skull.  "A lot more
dangerous than just a little.  I always used to say that, when I was
alive."

"When was that, exactly?"

"Can't remember.  I think I was pretty knowledgeable.  Probably a teacher
or philosopher, something of that kidney.  And now I'm on a bench with a
bird crapping on my head."

"Very allegorical," said the raven.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 87 (Stabbing: "in the" both capitalized; "and" not so)
%passage 6
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.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 125-126 ("him"==Librarian;
#              Leonard of Quirm==Discworld analog of Leonardo da Vinci)
%passage 7
The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained
to their shelves and are very dangerous.  It also contained perfectly
ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink.  It would be
a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading
them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky.  Reading them sometimes did
the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the
reader's brain.

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

Leonard's books were full of sketches--of kittens, of the way water flows,
of the wives of influential Ankh-Morporkian merchants whose portraits had
provided his means of making a living.  But Leonard had been a genius and
was deeply sensitive to the wonders of the world, so the margins were full
of detailed doodles of whatever was on this mind at the moment--vast
water-powered engines for bringing down city walls on the heads of the
enemy, new types of siege guns for pumping flaming oil over the enemy,
gunpowder rockets that showered the enemy with burning phosphorous, and
other manufactures of the Age of Reason.

And there had been something else.  The Librarian had noticed it in
passing once before, and had been slightly puzzled by it.  It seemed out
of place.(1)

(1) And didn't appear to do anything to the enemy /at all/.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 152 (much of the story concerns "Music With Rocks In")
%passage 8
Some religions say that the universe was started with a word, a song,
a dance, a piece of music.  The Listening Monks of the Ramtops have
trained their hearing until they can tell the value of a playing card by
listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the
subtle sounds of the universe to piece together, from the fossile echoes,
the very first noises.

There was certainly, they say, a very strange noise at the beginning of
everything.

But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the
frozen echoes in the ammonites and amber, swear they can detect some tiny
sounds before that.

It sounded, they say, like someone counting:  One, Two, Three, Four.

The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make
out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier.

When they asked him what it was, he said:  "It sounds like One, Two."

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 227
%passage 9
The Death of Rats put his nose in his paws.  It was a lot easier with
rats.(1)

(1) Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork.  Shortly
before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats.
The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat
tail.  This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats--and then
people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being
drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work.  And there /still/
seemed to be a lot of rats around.  Lord Vetinari had listened carefully
while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one
memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty
offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any
situtation involving money:  "Tax the rat farms."

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 313-314 (Drongo and Big Mad Adrian are students)
%passage 10
The Archchancellor polished this staff as he walked along.  It 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.

"Don't you think we should have brought the senior wizards, sir?" said
Ponder, struggling to keep up.

"I'm afraid that taking them along in their present state of mind would
only make what happens"--Ridcully sought for a useful phrase, and settled
for--"happen worse.  I've insisted they stay in college."

"How about Drongo and the others?" said Ponder hopefully.

"Would they be any good in the event of a thaumaturgical dimension rip of
enormous proportions?" said Ridcully.  "I remember poor Mr. Hong.  One
minute he was dishing up an order of double cod and mushy peas, the
next ..."

"Kaboom?" said Ponder.

"Kaboom?" said Ridcully, forcing his way up the crowded street.  "Not
that I heard tell.  More like 'Aaaaerrrr-scream-gristle- gristle-gristle-
crack' and a shower of fried food.  Big Mad Adrian and his friends any
good when the chips are down?"

"Um.  Probably not, Archchancellor."

"Correct.  People shout and run about.  That never did any good.  A pocket
full of decent spells and a well-charged staff will get you out of trouble
nine times out of ten."

"Nine times out of ten?"

"Correct."

"How many times have you had to rely on them, sir?"

"Well ... there was Mr. Hong ... that business with the thing in the
Bursar's wardrobe ... that dragon, you remember ..." Ridcully's lips
moved silently as he counted on his fingers.  "Nine times, so far."

"It worked every time, sir?"

"Absolutely!  So there's no need to worry.  Gangway!  Wizard comin'
through."

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 339
%passage 11
The wizards went rigid as the howl rang through the building.  It was
slightly animal but also mineral, metallic, edged like a saw.

Eventually the Lecturer in Recent Runes said, "Of course, just because
we've heard a spine-chilling blood-curdling scream of the sort to make
your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's
anything wrong."

The wizards looked out into the corridor.

"It came from downstairs somewhere," said the Chair of Indefinite Studies,
heading for the staircase.

"So why are you going /upstairs/?"

"Because I'm not daft!"

"But it might be some terrible emanation!"

"You don't say?" said the Chair, still accelerating.

"All right, please yourself.  That's the students floor up there."

"Ah, Er--"

The Chair came down slowly, occasionally glancing fearfully up the stairs.

  [Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Interesting Times (10)
# p.1 (footnote)
%passage 1
Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate.  People are
always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles.
When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, they say that's a miracle.  But of course if someone is
killed by a freak chain of events--the oil spilled just there, the safety
fence broken just there--that must also be a miracle.  Just because it's
not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 18
%passage 2
"Oh, no," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back.  "Not
that.  That's meddling with things you don't understand."

"Well, we /are/ wizards," said Ridcully. "We're supposed to meddle with
things we don't understand.  If we hung around waitin' till we understood
things we'd never get anything done."

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 4
%passage 3
According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest
abundance wherever order is being sought.  It always defeats order, because
it is better organized.

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 14
%passage 4
Many things went on at Unseen University and, regretably, 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.

The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on
the status of a tradition.  Lectures clearly took place, because they
were down there on the timetable in black and white.  The fact that no one
attended was an irrelevant detail.  It was occasionally maintained that
this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no one ever
attended them to find out if this was true.  Anyway, it was argued (by the
Reader in Woolly Thinking(1)) that lectures had taken place /in essence/,
so that was all right, too.

And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old
method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinty 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.

(1) Which is like Fuzzy Logic, only less so.

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 20 (speaker is Archchancellor Ridcully; sad, hopless person is Rincewind)
%passage 5
"Wizzard?" he said.  "What kind of sad, hopeless person needs to write
WIZZARD on their hat?"

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 113
%passage 6
Self-doubt was something not regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium.
When you're trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted
temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the
other there is little time for reflection.  Natural selection saw to it
that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves
questions like "What is the purpose of life?" very quickly lacked both.

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 113 (same page as previous passage...)
%passage 7
Cohen's father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a
lad, and explained to him the hero's creed and told him that there was no
greater joy than to die in battle.

Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime's experience
had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the /other/
bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your
horse.  It was an observation that had served him well.

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 144
%passage 8
"'Dang'?" he said.  "Wassat mean?  And what's this 'darn' and 'heck'?"

"They are ... /civilised/ swearwords." said Mr. Saveloy.

"Well, you can take 'em and--"

"Ah?" said Mr. Saveloy, raising a cautionary finger.

"You can shove them up--"

"Ah?"

"You can--"

"Ah?"

Truckle shut his eyes and clenched his fists.

"Darn it all to heck!" he shouted.

"Good," said Mr. Saveloy.  "That's much better."

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 219 (sic: "Dedd")
%passage 9
The taxman was warming to his new job.  He'd worked out that although the
Horde, as individuals, had acquired mountains of cash in their careers as
barbarian heroes they'd lost almost all of it engaging in the other
activities (he mentally catalogued these as Public Relations) necessary to
the profession, and therefore were entitled to quite a considerable rebate.

The fact that they were registered with no revenue collecting authority
/anywhere/(1) was entirely a secondary point.  It was the principle that
counted.  And the interest, too, of course.

(1) Except on posters with legends like "Wanted--Dedd".

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 297
%passage 10
"What do we do now?" said Mr. Saveloy.  "Do we do a battle chant or
something?"

"We just wait," said Cohen.

"There's a lot of waiting in warfare," said Boy Willie.

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Saveloy.  "I've heard people say that.  They say
there's long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement."

"Not really," said Cohen.  "It's more like short periods of waiting
followed by long periods of being dead."

  [Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Maskerade (9)
# pp. 81-82, continued on pp. 87-89 (Harper Torch edition; apparently
#       transcribed from some other edition based on quote marks used;
#       a great number of very short paragraphs--it stretches a long way
#       when using a blank line to separate one paragraph from another;
#       one omitted bit is that after Granny shuffles the deck of cards
#       and deals two poker hands, Death swaps them, suggesting that
#       he suspected her of cheating; initial transcription left off
#       the most interesting bit, Death's wink at the end)
%passage 1
'Maybe you could ... help us?'

'What's wrong?'

'It's my boy ...'

Granny opened the door farther and saw the woman standing behind Mr. Slot.
One look at her face was enough.  There was a bundle in her arms.

Granny stepped back.  'Bring him in and let me have a look at him.'

She took the baby from the woman, sat down on the room's one chair, and
pulled back the blanket.  Nanny Ogg peered over her shoulder.

'Hmm,' said Granny, after a while.  She glanced at Nanny, who gave an
almost imperceptible shake of her head.

'There's a curse on this house, that's what it is,' said Slot.  'My best
cow's been taken mortally sick, too.'

'Oh?  You have a cowshed?' said Granny.  'Very good place for a sickroom,
a cowshed.  It's the warmth.  You better show me where it is.'

'You want to take the boy down there?'

'Right now.'

  [...]

'How many have you come for?'

ONE.

'The cow?'

Death shook his head.

'It could /be/ the cow.'

NO.  THAT WOULD BE CHANGING HISTORY.

'History is about things changing.'

NO.

Granny sat back.

'Then I challenge you to a game.  That's traditional.  That's /allowed/.'

Death was silent for a moment.

THIS IS TRUE.

'Good.'

CHALLENGING ME BY MEANS OF A GAME IS ALLOWABLE.

"Yes."

HOWEVER ... YOU UNDERSTAND THAT TO WIN ALL YOU MUST GAMBLE ALL?

'Double or quits?  Yes, I know.'

BUT NOT CHESS.

'Can't abide chess.'

OR CRIPPLE MR. ONION.  I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES.

'Very well.  How about one hand of poker?  Five cards each, no draws?
Sudden death, as they say.'

Death thought about this, too.

YOU KNOW THIS FAMILY?

'No.'

THEN WHY?

'Are we talking or are we playing?'

OH, VERY WELL.

  [...]

Granny looked at her cards, and threw them down.

FOUR QUEENS.  HMM.  THAT /IS/ VERY HIGH.

Death looked down at his cards, and then up into Granny's steady, blue-eyed
gaze.

Neither moved for some time.

Then Death laid the hand on the table.

I LOSE, he said.  ALL I HAVE IS FOUR ONES.

He looked back into Granny's eyes for a moment.  There was a blue glow in
the depth of his eye-sockets.  Maybe, for the merest fraction of a second,
barely noticeable even to the closest observation, one winked off.

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 67 (Harper Torch edition; as above, transcribed from some other edition)
%passage 2
The letter inside was on a sheet of the Opera House's own note paper.
In neat, copperplate writing, it said:

  Ahahahahaha!  Ahahahaha!  Aahahaha!
            BEWARE!!!!!

          Yrs sincerely
              The Opera Ghost

'What sort of person,' said Salzella patiently, 'sits down and /writes/ a
maniacal laugh?  And all those exclamation marks, you notice?  Five?  A
sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.  Opera can do
that to a man.'

     [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 30-31 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
Agnes had woken up one morning with the horrible realization that she'd
been saddled with a lovely personality.  It was as simple as that.  Oh,
and very good hair.

It wasn't so much the personality, it was the "but" people always added
when they talked about it.  /But she's got a lovely personality/, they
said.  It was the lack of choice that rankled.  No one had asked her,
before she was born, whether she wanted a lovely personality or whether
she'd prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take
size nine in dresses.  Instead, people would take pains to tell her that
beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair
of kidneys.

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 258
%passage 4
'And what can I get you, officers?' she said.

'Officers?  Us?' said the Count de Nobbes.  'What makes you think we're
watchmen?'

'He's got a helmet on,' Nanny pointed out.  'Also, he's got his badge
pinned to his coat.'

'I /told/ you to put it away!' Nobby hissed.  He looked at Nanny and
smiled uneasily.  'Milit'ry chic,' he said.  'It's just a fashion
accessory.  Actually, we are gentlemen of means and have nothing to do
with the city Watch whatsoever.'

'Well, /gentlemen/, would you like some wine?'

'Not while we on duty, t'anks,' said the troll.

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 27 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 5
Lancre had always bred strong, capable women.  A Lancre farmer needed a
wife who'd think nothing of beating a wolf to death with her apron when
she went out to get some firewood.  And, while kissing initially seemed to
have more charms than cookery, a stolid Lancre lad looking for a bride
would bear in mind his father's advice that kisses eventually lost their
fire but cookery tended to get even better over the years, and direct his
courting to those families that clearly showed a tradition of enjoying
their food.

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 28
%passage 6
Music and magic had a lot in common.  They were only two letters apart,
for one thing.  And you couldn't do both.

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 31
%passage 7
She'd caught herself saying "poot!" and "dang!" when she wanted to swear,
and using pink writing paper.

She'd got a reputation for being calm and capable in a crisis.

Next thing she knew she'd be making shortbread and apple pies as good as
her mother's, and then there'd be no hope for her.

So she'd introduced Perdita.  She'd heard somewhere that inside every fat
woman was a thin woman trying to get out,(1) so she'd named her Perdita.
She was a good repository for all those thoughts that Agnes couldn't think
on account of her wonderful personality.  Perdita would use black writing
paper if she could get away with it, and would be beautifully pale instead
of embarassingly flushed.  Perdita wanted to be an interestingly lost soul
in plum-colored lipstick.  Just occasionally, though, Agnes thought
Perdita was as dumb as she was.

(1) Or, at least, dying for chocolate.

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 197 (dress shop proprietor has just sold an expensive dress to Granny)
%passage 8
She looked down at the money in her hand.

She knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that
people had hung on to it for years, and she knew about new money, which
seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the
city these days.  But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork
shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in
her hand rather than someone else's.  The best kind of money was mine,
not yours.

Besides, she was also enough of a snob to confuse rudeness with good
breeding.  In the same way that the really rich can never be mad (they're
eccentric), so they can also never be rude (they're outspoken and
forthright).

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 288-289
%passage 9
Detritus reached down and picked up an eye patch.

"What d'you think, then?" said Nobby scornfully.  "You think he turned into
a bat and flew away?"

"Ha!  I do not t'ink that 'cos it is in ... consist ... ent with modern
policing," said Detritus.

"Well, /I/ think," said Nobby, "that when you have ruled out the impossible,
what is left, however improbable, ain't worth hanging around on a cold night
wonderin' about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink.
Come on.  I want to try a leg of the elephant that bit me."

"Was dat irony?"

"That was metaphor."

  [Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Feet of Clay (14)
%passage 1
Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through
anything.  It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need
people.  It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever
touching lips.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 337 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
It was hard enough to kill a vampire.  You could stake them down and turn
them into dust and ten years later someone drops a drop of blood in the
wrong place and /guess who's back/?  They returned more times than raw
broccoli.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 4
%passage 3
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only
because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other.  They don't
look quite like real science.(1)  But geography is only physics slowed
down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of
excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity.  And summer isn't a time.
It's a place as well.  Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south
for the winter.

(1) That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra
legs and then blow it up.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 19
%passage 4
Upstairs, Vimes pushed open his office door carefully.  The Assassins'
Guild played to rules.  You could say that about the bastards.  It was
terribly bad form to kill a bystander.  Apart from anything else, you
wouldn't get paid.  So traps in his office were out of the question,
because too many people were in and out of it every day.  Even so, it
paid to be careful.  Vimes /was/ good at making the kind of rich enemies
who could afford to employ assassins.  The assassins had to be lucky
only once, but Vimes had to be lucky all the time.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 86 (passage continues, actually finding an image in dead man's eyes)
%passage 5
"Er ... have you ever heard the story about dead men's eyes, sir?"

"Assume I haven't had a literary education, Littlebottom."

"Well ... they say ..."

"/Who/ say?"

"/They/, sir.  You know, /they/."

"The same people who're the 'everyone' in 'everyone knows'?  The people
who live in 'the community'?"

"Yes, sir.  I suppose so, sir."

Vimes waved a hand.  "Oh, /them/.  Well, go on."

"They say that the last thing a man sees stays imprinted in his eyes, sir."

"Oh, /that/.  That's just an old story."

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 127-128
%passage 6
Everyone in the city looked after themselves.  That's what the guilds were
for.  People banded together against other people.  The guild looked after
you from the cradle to the grave or, in the case of the Assassins, to
other people's graves.  They even maintained the law, or at least they had
done, after a fashion.  Thieving without a license was punishable by death
for the first offense.(1)  The Thieves' Guild saw to that.  The arrangement
sounded unreal, but it worked.

It worked like a machine.  That was fine except for the occasional people
who got caught in the wheels.

(1) The Ankh-Morpork view of crime and punishment was that the penalty for
the first offence should prevent the possibility of a second offense.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 129, continued pp. 132-133
%passage 7
Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head, and set off after it.  No
thought was involved.  It is the ancient instinct of terriers and
policemen to chase anything that runs away.

  [...]

Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure.  It wasn't quite
so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning
stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled
pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out from a cross street.(1)

(1) This always happens in any police chase /anywhere/.  A heavily laden
lorry will /always/ pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit.  If
vehicles aren't involved, then it'll be a man with a rack of garments.
Or two men with a large sheet of glass.  There's probably some kind of
secret society behind all this.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 165
%passage 8
Ron had a small grayish-brown, torn-eared terrier on the end of a string,
although in truth it would be hard for an observer to know exactly who
was leading whom and who, when push came to shove, would be the one to
fold at the knees if the other shouted "Sit!"  Because, although trained
canines as aids for those bereft of sight, and even of hearing, have
frequently been used throughout the universe, Foul Ole Ron was the first
person ever to own a Thinking-Brain Dog.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 173-174
%passage 9
Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues.

He had a jaundiced view of Clues.  He instinctively distrusted them.  They
got in the way.

And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man
and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir.  I can tell
you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some
years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and
then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance
and the state of a man's boots, when /exactly the same/ comments could
apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a
spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tatooed
once when he was drunk and seventeen(1) and in fact got seasick on a wet
pavement.  What arrogance!  What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety
of the human experience.

It was the same with more static evidence.  The footprints in the
flowerbed were probably /in the real world/ left by the window-cleaner.
The scream in the night was quite likely a man getting out of bed and
stepping sharply on an upturned hairbrush.

The real world was far too /real/ to leave neat little hints.  It was full
of too many things.  It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got
at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of
eliminating the possibilities.  You worked away, patiently asking questions
and looking hard at things.  You walked and talked, and in your heart you
just hoped like hell that some bugger's nerve'd crack and he'd give himself
up.

(1) These terms are often synonymous.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 188
%passage 10
"Life has certainly been more reliable under Vetinari," said Mr. Potts of
the Bakers' Guild.

"He does have all the street-theater players and mime artists thrown into
the scorpion pit," said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves' Guild.

"True.  But let's not forget that he has his bad points too.  [...]"

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 198
%passage 11
What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected.  Constable Visit had told
him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve
/that/?

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 295
%passage 12
Rogers the bulls were angry and bewildered, which counts as the basic state
of mind for full grown bulls.(1)

(1) Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls'
view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping
hemispherical view of the world.  Since there were two separate visions,
Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls not having
been bred for much deductive reasoning).  Most bulls believe this, which is
why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at
you.  They do this because both of them want to see.

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 312 ('meaning' line capitalizes every word, including 'A','For','To')
%passage 13
"It's the most menacing dwarf battle-cry there is!  Once it's been shouted
/someone/ has to be killed!"

"What's it mean?"

"Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 347 (Colon is addressing Dorfl, a golem who is joining the Watch)
%passage 14
"Y'know," said Colon, "if it doesn't work out, you could always get a job
making fortune cookies."

"Funny thing, that," said Nobby.  "You never get bad fortunes in cookies,
ever noticed that?  They never say stuff like: 'Oh dear, things are going
to be /really/ bad.'  I mean, they're never /misfortune/ cookies."

Vimes lit a cigar and shook the match to put it out.  "That, Corporal, is
because of one of the fundamental driving forces of the universe."

"What?  Like, people who read fortune cookies are the lucky ones?" said
Nobby.

"No.  Because people who /sell/ fortune cookies want to go on selling
them.  [...]"

  [Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Hogfather (10)
# p. 1 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 1
Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree.

But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of
things.  They wonder how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the
makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.  Yet there is the
constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, raveling
nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate
that here, /here/, is the point where it all began ...

/Something/ began when the Guild of Assassins enrolled Mister Teatime,
who saw things differently from other people, and one of the ways that
he saw things differently from other people was in seeing other people
as things (later, Lord Downey of the Guild said, "We took pity on him
because he'd lost both parents at an early age.  I think that, on
reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that.")

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 28-29
%passage 2
If asked to describe what they did for a living, the five men around the
table would have said something like "This and that" or "The best I can,"
although in Banjo's case he'd probably have said "Dur?"  They were, by the
standards of an uncaring society, criminals, although they wouldn't have
thought of themselves as such and couldn't even /spell/ words like
"nefarious."  What they generally did was move things around.  Sometimes
the things were on the wrong side of a steel door, or in the wrong house.
Sometimes the things 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 would be much better located on, for
example, a sea bed somewhere.(1)  None of the five belonged to any formal
guild and they generally found their clients among those people who, for
their own dark reasons, didn't want to put the guilds to any trouble,
sometimes because they were guild members themselves.  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.

(1) Chickenwire had got his name from his own individual contribution to
the science of this very specialized "concrete overshoe" form of waste
disposal.  An unfortunate drawback of the process was the tendency for
bits of the client to eventually detach and float to the surface, causing
much comment among the general poplation.  Enough chicken wire, he pointed
out, would solve that, while also allowing the ingress of crabs and fish
going about their vital recycling activities.

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 109-110
%passage 3
Although it was Hogswatch the University buildings were bustling.  Wizards
didn't go to bed early in any case,(1) and of course there was the
Hogswatchnight Feast to look forward to at midnight.

It would give some idea of the scale of the Hogswatchnight Feast that a
light snack at UU consisted of three or four courses, not counting the
cheese and nuts.

Some of the wizards had been practicing for weeks.  The Dean in particular
could now lift a twenty-pound turkey on one fork.  Having to wait until
midnight merely put a healthy edge on appetites already professionally
honed.

(1) Often they lived to a time scale to suit themselves.  Many of the
senior ones, of course, lived entirely in the past, but several were like
the Professor of Anthropics, who had invented an entire temporal system
based on the belief that all the other ones were a mere illusion.

Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles.  The
Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be
constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they
could make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One
says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that
humans should not only work in universities, but also write for huge sums
books with words like "Cosmic" and "Chaos" in the titles.(2)

The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable
Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of
the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics.
But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely
everyone, with only some minor details of a "Fill in name here" nature,
secretly believes to be true.

(2) And they are correct.  The universe clearly operates for the benefit
of humanity.  This can be readily seen by the convenient way the sun comes
up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 112-113 (we end this passage mid-paragraph...)
%passage 4
"Watch this, sir," said Ponder.  "All right, Adrian, initialize the GBL."

"How do you do that, then?" said Ridcully, behind him.

"It ... it means pull the great big lever," Ponder said, reluctantly.

"Ah.  Takes less time to say."

Ponder sighed.  "Yes, that's right, Archchancellor."

He nodded to one of the students, who pulled a large red lever marked "Do
Not Pull."  Gears spun, somewhere inside Hex.  Little trapdoors opened in
the ant farms and millions of ants began to scurry along the networks of
glass tubing.  Ponder tapped at the huge wooden keyboard.

"Beats me how you fellows remember how to do all this stuff," said Ridcully,
still watching him with what Ponder considered to be amused interest.

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

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 139-140
%passage 5
"Tell me, Senior Wrangler, we never invited any /women/ to the
Hogswatchnight Feast, did we?"

"Of course not, Archchancellor," said the Senior Wrangler.  He looked up
in the dust-covered rafters, wondering what had caught the Archchancellor's
eye.  "Good heavens, no.  They'd spoil everything.  I've always said so."

"And all the maids have got the evening off until midnight?."

"A very generous custom, I've always said," said the Senior Wrangler,
feeling his neck crick.

"So why, every year, do we hang a damn great bunch of mistletoe up there?"

The Senior Wrangler turned in a circle, still looking upward.

"Well, er ... it's well, it's ... it's symbolic, Archchancellor."

"Ah?"

The Senior Wrangler felt that something more was expected.  He groped
around in the dusty attics of his education.

"Of ... the leaves, d'y'see ... they're symbolic of ... of green, d'y'see,
whereas the berries, in fact, yes, the berries symbolize ... symbolize
white.  Yes.  White and green.  Very ... symbolic."

He waited.  He was not, unfortunately, disappointed.

"What of?"

The Senior Wrangler coughed.

"I'm not sure there /has/ to be an /of/," he said.

"Ah?  So," said the Archchancellor thoughtfully, "it could be said that
the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?"

"Yes, indeed," said the Senior Wrangler.

"So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?"

"Exactly, Archchancellor," said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just
hanging on.

"Funny thing, that," said Ridcully, in the same thoughful tone of voice.
"That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully
comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute
tosh.  Which is it, I wonder?"

"It could be both," said the Senior Wrangler desperately.

"And /that/ comment," said Ridcully, "is either very perceptive or very
trite."

"It could be bo--"

"Don't push it, Senior Wrangler."

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 170 ([sic], sentence at end of paragraph should have fourth period)
%passage 6
What Ponder was worried about was the fear that he was simply engaged in a
cargo cult.  He'd read about them.  Ignorant(1) and credulous(2) people,
whose island might once have been visited by some itinerant merchant
vessel that traded pearls and coconuts for such fruits of civilization as
glass beads, mirrors, axes, and sexual diseases, would later make big model
ships out of bamboo in the hope of once again attracting this magical
cargo.  Of course, they were far too ignorant and credulous to know that
just because you built the shape you didn't get the substance ...

(1) Ignorant:  the 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 identical-looking species of the purple
sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the
Sago-sago 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.

(2) Credulous:  having views about the world, the universe and humanity's
place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the
most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 244 (mantelpiece:  it's dark and Ponder is checking whether the Hogfather
#         [Discworld analog of Santa Claus/Father Christmas] has been there
#         and left presents in the stocking the Librarian has hung)
%passage 7
There was silence again, and then a clang.  The Librarian grunted in his
sleep.

"What are you doing?"

"I just knocked over the coal shovel."

"Why are feeling around on the mantelpiece?"

Oh, just ... you know, just ... just looking.  A little ... experiment.
After all, you never know."

"You never know what?"

"Just ... never know, you know."

"/Sometimes/ you know," said Ridcully.  "I think I know quite a lot that
I didn't used to know.  It's amazing what you /do/ end up knowing, I
sometimes think.  I often wonder what new stuff I'll know."

"Well, you never know."

"That's a fact."

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 330
%passage 8
IT GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN, LIFE, said Death, stepping forward.  SPEAKING
METAPHORICALLY, OF COURSE.  IT'S A HABIT THAT'S HARD TO GIVE UP.  ONE PUFF
OF BREATH IS NEVER ENOUGH.  YOU'LL FIND YOU WANT TO TAKE ANOTHER.

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 336
%passage 9
HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN.  TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL
MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth Fairies?  Hogfathers?  Little--"

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.

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 343 (Mr. Teatime [pronounced Teh-ah-tim-eh] has just been thwarted in
#         his elabrate plot to lure and then kill Death)
%passage 10
"What did he do it all for?" said Susan.  "I mean, why?  Money?  Power?"

SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING FOR THE SHEER FASCINATION OF DOING IT, said
Death.  OR THE FAME.  OR BECAUSE THEY SHOULDN'T.

  [Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Jingo (12)
%passage 1
It was so much easier to blame it on Them.  It was bleakly depressing to
think that They were Us.  If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault.
If it was us, what did that make Me?  After all, I'm one of Us.  I must be.
I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them.  No one ever thinks
of themselves as one of Them.  We're always one of Us.  It's Them that do
the bad things.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 23-25 (Harper Torch edition) [transcribed from some other edition]
%passage 2
There was a general shifting of position and a group clearing of throats.

'What about mercenaries?' said Boggis.

'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--'

Selachii thumped the table.

'Very well, then, by jingo!' he snarled.  'Alone!'

'We could certainly do with one,' said Lord Vetinari.  'We need the money.
I was about to say that we cannot /afford/ mercenaries.'

'How can this be?' said Lord Downey.  Don't we pay our taxes?'

'Ah, I thought we might come to that,' said Lord Vetinari.  He raised
his hand and, on cue again, his clerk placed a piece of paper in it.

'Let me see now ... ah yes.  Guild of Assassins ...  Gross earnings in
the last year: AM$13,207,048.  Taxes paid in the last year: forty-seven
dollars, twenty-two pence and what on examination turned out to be a
Hershebian half-/dong/, worth one eighth of a penny.'

'That's all perfectly legal!  The Guild of Accountants--'

'Ah yes.  Guild of Accountants: gross earnings AM$7,999,011.  Taxes paid:
nil.  But, ah yes, I see they applied for a rebate of AM$200,000.'

'And what we received, I may say, included a Hershebian half-/dong/,'
said Mr Frostrip of the Guild of Accountants.

'What goes around comes around,' said Vetinari calmly.

He tossed the paper aside.  'Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy
farming.  The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the
minimum of moo.  And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.'

'Are you telling us that Ankh-Morpork is /bankrupt/?' said Downey.

'Of course.  While, at the same time, full of rich people.  I trust they
have been spending their good fortune on swords.'

'And you have /allowed/ this wholesale tax avoidance?' said Lord Selachii.

'Oh, the taxes haven't been avoided,' said Lord Vetinari.  'Or even evaded.
They just haven't been paid.'

'That is a disgusting state of affairs!'

The Patrician raised his eyebrows. 'Commander Vines?'

'Yes, sir?'

'Would you be so good as to assemble a squad of your most experienced men,
liaise with the tax gatherers and obtain the accumulated back taxes,
please?  My clerk here will give you a list of the prime defaulters.'

'Right, sir.  And if they resist, sir?' said Vimes, smiling nastily.

'Oh, how can they resist, commander?  This is the will of our civic
leaders.'  He took the paper his clerk proferred.  'Let me see, now.  Top
of the list--'

Lord Selachii coughed hurriedly.  'Far too late for that sort of nonsense
now,' he said.

'Water under the bridge,' said Lord Downey.

'Dead and buried,' said Mr Slant.

'I paid mine,' said Vimes.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 7 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
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.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 34
%passage 4
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 post-
graduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 43-44
%passage 5
"Hey, that's Reg Shoe!  He's a zombie.  He falls to bits all the time!"

"Very big man in undead community, sir," said Carrott.

"How come /he/ joined?"

"He came round last week to complain about the Watch harassing some
bogeymen, sir.  He was very, er, vehement, sir.  So I persuaded him that
what the Watch needed was some expertise, so he joined up, sir."

"No more complaints?"

"Twice as many, sir.  All from undead, sir, and all against Mr. Shoe.
Funny That."

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 78-79
%passage 6
Perhaps it was because he was tired, or just because he was trying to shut
out the world, but Vimes found himself slowing down into the traditional
Watchman's walk and the traditional idling thought process.

It was an almost Pavlovian response.(1)  The legs swung, the feet moved,
the mind began to work in a certain way.  It wasn't a dream state, exactly.
It was just that the ears, nose and eyeballs wired themselves straight into
the ancient "suspicious bastard" node of his brain, leaving his higher
brain center free to freewheel.

(1) A term invented by the wizard Denephew Boot,(2) who had found that by
a system of rewards and punishments he could train a dog, at the ringing
of a bell, to immediately eat a strawberry meringue.

(2) His parents, who were uncomplicated country people, had wanted a girl.
They were expecting to call her Denise.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 92-93
%passage 7
"What was it, Leonard?"

"An experimental device for turning chemical energy into rotary motion,"
said Leonard.  "The problem, you see, is getting the little pellets of
black powder into the combustion chamber at exactly the right speed and
one at a time.  If two ignite together, well, what he have is the
/external/ combustion engine."

"And, er, what would be the purpose of it?" said the Patrician.

"I believe it could replace the horse," Leonard said proudly.

They looked at the stricken thing.

"One of the advantages of horses that people often point out," said
Vetinari, after some thought, "is that they very seldom explode.  Almost
never, in my experience, apart from that unfortunate occurrence in the hot
summer a few years ago."  With fastidious fingers he pulled something out
of the mess.  It was a pair of cubes, made out of some soft white fur and
linked together by a piece of string.  There were dots on them.

"Dice?" he said.

Leonard smiled in an embarrassed fashion.  "Yes.  I can't think why I
thought they'd help it go better.  It was just, well, an idea.  You know
how it is."

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 98 (1st "He": Leonard; 2nd "He": Vetinari; last "He": Leonard again)
%passage 8
He was as easily distracted as a kitten.  All that business with the
flying machine, for example.  Giant bat wings hung from the ceiling even
now.  The Patrician had been more than happy to let him waste his time on
that idea, because it was obvious to anyone that no human being would ever
be able to flap the wings hard enough.

He needn't have worried.  Leonard was his own distraction.  He had ended
up spending ages designing a special tray so that people could eat their
meals in the air.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 155
%passage 9
She held the lamp higher.

Ramkins looked down their noses at her from their frames, through the brown
varnish of the centuries.  Portraits were another thing that had been
collected out of unregarded habit.

Most of them were men.  They were invariably in armor and always on
horseback.  And every single one of them had fought the sworn enemies of
Ankh-Morpork.

In recent times this had been quite difficult and her grandfather, for
example, had to lead an expedition all the way to Howondaland in order to
find some sworn enemies, although there was an adequate supply and a lot
of swearing by the time he left.  Earlier, of course, it had been a lot
easier.  Ramkin regiments had fought the city's enemies all over the Sto
Plains and had inflicted heroic casualties, quite often on people in the
opposing armies.(1)

(1) 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.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 180-181 (the same gag was used in the 1968 movie "Support Your Local
#              Sheriff", with a dented badge rather than a book)
%passage 10
He rummaged in a pocket and produced a very small book, which he held up
for inspection.

"This belonged to my great-grandad," he said.  "He was in the scrap we had
against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayers for
soldiers, 'cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and
he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, 'cause he couldn't afford
armor, and next day in battle--whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham,
straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page
before stopping, look.  You can see the hole."

"Pretty miraculous," Carrot agreed.

"Yeah, it was, I s'pose," said the sergeant.  He looked ruefully at the
battered volume.  "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really."

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 218
%passage 11
"Er ... what is this thing called?" said Colon, as he followed the
Patrician up the ladder.

"Well, because it is /submersed/ in a /marine/ environment, I've always
called it the Going-Under-the-Water-Safely Device," said Leonard, behind
him.(1)  "But usually I just think of it as the boat."

(1) Thinking up good names was, oddly enough, was one area where Leonard
of Quirm's genious tended to give up.

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 274 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 12
"[...]  I mean, what're our long-term objectives?"

"Cooking meals and keeping warm?" said Les hopefully.

"Well, /initially/," said Jackson.  "That's obvious.  But you know what
they say, lad.  'Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to
him and he's warm for the rest of his life.'  See my point?"

"I don't think that's actually what the saying is--"

  [Jingo, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title The Last Continent (10)
# p. 260 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 1
"Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?"

YES.

"Ghastly thought, really."  Rincewind shuddered.  "Oh, /gods/, I've just
had another one.  Suppose I /am/ just about to die and /this/ is my whole
life passing in front of my eyes?"

I THINK PERHAPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND.  PEOPLE'S WHOLE LIVES /DO/ PASS IN
FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE.  THE PROCESS IS CALLED "LIVING".  [...]

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
"When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the
Rest of Your Life."

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p.3 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of "true."

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 13-14
%passage 4
Ponder /knew/ he should never have let Ridcully look at the invisible
writings.  Wasn't it a basic principle never to let your employer know what
it is that you actually /do/ all day?

But no matter what precautions you took, sooner or later the boss was bound
to come in and poke around and say things like, "Is this where you work,
then?" and "I thought I sent a memo out about people bringing in potted
plants," and "What d'you call that thing with the keyboard?"

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 21 (passage begins mid-paragraph)
%passage 5
[...]  Any true wizard, faced with a sign like "Do not open this door.
Really.  We mean it.  We're not kidding.  Opening this door will mean the
end of the universe," would /automatically/ open the door in order to see
what all the fuss was about.  This made signs a waste of time, but at least
it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving
relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, "We /told/ him not to."

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 22 (the books are acting up while the Librarian is incapacitated and
#        now it's unsafe to go into the library)
%passage 6
"But we're a university!  We /have/ to have a library!" said Ridcully.  "It
adds /tone/.  What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the
Library?"

"Students," said the Senior Wrangler morosely.

"Hah, I remember when I was a student," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
"Old 'Bogeyboy' Swallett took us on an expedition to find the Lost Reading
Room.  Three weeks we were wandering around.  We had to eat our own boots."

"Did you find it?" said the Dean.

"No, but we found the remains of the previous year's expedition."

"What did you do?"

"We ate their boots, too."

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 45-46
%passage 7
Death had taken to keeping Rincewind's lifetimer on a special shelf in his
study, in much the way that a zoologist would want to keep an eye on a
particularly intriguing specimen.

The lifetimers of most people were the classic shape that Death thought
was right and proper for the task.  They appeared to be large eggtimers,
although, since the sands they measured were the living seconds of
someone's life, all the eggs were in one basket.

Rincewind's hourglass looked like something created by a glassblower who'd
had hiccups in a time machine.  According to the amount of actual sand it
contained--and Death was pretty good at making this kind of estimate--he
should have died long ago.  But strange curves and bends and extrusions of
glass had developed over the years, and quite often the sand was flowing
backwards, or diagonally.  Clearly, Rincewind had been hit by so much
magic, had been thrust reluctantly through time and space so often that
he'd nearly bumped into himself coming the other way, that the precise end
of his life was now as hard to find as the starting point on a roll of
really sticky transparent tape.

Death was familiar with the concept of the eternal, ever-renewed hero, the
champion with a thousand faces.  He'd refrained from commenting.  He met
heroes frequently, generally surrounded by, and this was important, the
dead bodies of /very nearly/ all of their enemies and saying, "Vot the hell
shust happened?"  Whether there was some arrangement that allowed them to
come back again afterwards was not something he would be drawn on.

But he pondered whether, if this creature /did/ exist, it was somehow
balanced by the eternal coward.  The hero with a thousand retreating backs,
perhaps.  Many cultures had a legend of an undying hero who would one day
rise again, so perhaps the balance of nature called for one who wouldn't.

Whatever the ultimate truth of the matter, the fact now was that Death did
not have the slightest idea of when Rincewind was going to die.  This was
very vexing to a creature who prided himself on his punctuality.

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 61
%passage 8
A black and white bird appeared, and perched on his head.

"You know what to do," said the old man.

"Him?  What a wonga," said the bird.  "I've been lookin' at him.  He's not
even heroic.  He's just in the right place at the right time."

The old man indicated that this was maybe the definition of a hero.

"All right, but why not go and get the thing yerself?" said the bird.

"You've gotta have heroes," said the old man.

"And I suppose I'll have to help," said the bird.  It sniffed, which is
quite hard to do through a beak.

"Yep.  Off you go."

The bird shrugged, which /is/ easy to do if you have wings, and flew down
off the old man's head.  It didn't land on the rock but flew into it; for
a moment there was a drawing of a bird, and then if faded.

Creators aren't gods.  They make places, which is quite hard.  It's men
that make gods.  This explains a lot.

The old man sat down and waited.

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 186
%passage 9
She had a very straightforward view of foreign parts, or at least those
more distant than her sister's house in Quirm where she spent a week's
holiday every year.  They were inhabited by people who were more to be
pitied than blamed because, really, they were like children.(1)  And they
acted like savages.(2)

(1) That is to say, she secretly considered them to be vicious, selfish
and untrustworthy.

(2) Again, when people like Mrs. Whitlow use this term they are not, for
some inexplicable reason, trying to suggest that the subjects have a rich
oral tradition, a complex system of tribal rights and a deep respect for
the spirits of their ancestors.  They are implying the kind of behavior
more generally associated, oddly enough, with people wearing a full suit
of clothes, often with the same sort of insignia.

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 187 (last paragraph truncated)
%passage 10
"I suppose he wouldn't have done anything stupid, would he?" he said.

"Archchancellor, Ponder Stibbons is a fully trained wizard!" said the Dean.

"Thank you for that very concise and definite answer, Dean," said Ridcully.

  [The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Carpe Jugulum (8)
# p. 10 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 1
Agnes tended to obey rules.  Perdita didn't.  Perdita thought that not
obeying rules was somehow cool.  Agnes thought that rules like "Don't fall
into this huge pit of spikes" were there for a purpose.  [...]

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 2 (example of the silliness and incomprehensability of the
#       Nac mac Feegle [aka pictsies, pict + pixie]; fortunately their
#       speech doesn't constitute much of the book's dialogue)
%passage 2
"Nac mac Feegle!"

"Ach, stickit yer trakkans!"

"Gie you sich a kickin'!"

"Bigjobs!"

"Dere c'n onlie be whin t'ousand!"

"Nac mac Feegle wha hae!"

"Wha hae yersel, ya boggin!"

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 28 (from a discussion about whether Omnian priests still burn witches)
%passage 3
"Hah!  The leopard does not change his shorts, my girl!"

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 133
%passage 4
Things were not what they seemed.  But then, as Granny always said, they
never were.

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 254-255 ("verra comp-lic-ated" is accurate)
%passage 5
"How can I ever repay you?" he said.

The pixie's eyes gleamed happily.

"Oh, there's a wee bitty thing the Carlin' Ogg said you could be givin' us,
hardly important at all," he said.

"Anything," said Verence.

A couple of pixies came up staggering under a rolled-up parchment, which
was unfolded in front of Verence.  The old pixie was suddenly holding a
quill pen.

"It's called a signature," he said, as Verence stared at the tiny
handwriting.  "An' make sure ye initial all the sub-clauses and codicils.
We of the Nac mac Feegle are a simple folk," he added, "but we write verra
comp-lic-ated documents."

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 326 (Igor's lisp of "th" for "s" makes this /look/ intentionally archaic
#         although it wouldn't be pronounced that way)
%passage 6
"What goeth around, cometh around," said Igor.

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 336-337 (the plot is driven by the actions of a family of vampyres
#             who do mostly cooperate with each other)
%passage 7
Vampires are not naturally cooperative creatures.  It's not in their nature.
Every other vampire is a rival for the next meal.  In fact, the ideal
situation for a vampire is a world in which every other vampire has been
killed off and no one seriously believes in vampires anymore.  They are by
nature as cooperative as sharks.

Vampyres are just the same, the only real difference being that they can't
spell properly.

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 338
%passage 8
"Be resolute, my dear," said the Count.  "Remember--that which does not
kill us can only make us stronger."

"And that which /does/ kill us leaves us /dead/!" snarled Lacrimosa.  "You
saw what happened to the others!  /You/ got your fingers burned!."

  [Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title The Fifth Elephant (9)
%passage 1
You did something because it had always been done,
and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way."
A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 233 (Harper Torch edition) [this is a footnote]
%passage 2
He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery:  It facinated
people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and
interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they
created vast banquets in their imagination--but at the end of the day
they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done and
maybe had a slice of tomato.

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 80-81 (Harper Torch edition) [the pigeon is trained to carry messages]
%passage 3
Constable Shoe saluted, but a litle testily.  He'd been waiting rather a
long time.

"Afternoon, Sergeant--"

"That's Captain," said Captain Colon.  "See the pip on my shoulder, Reg?"

Reg looked closely.  "I thought it was bird doings, Sarge."

"That's Captain," said Colon Automatically.  "It's only chalk now because
I ain't got time to get it done properly," he said, "so don't be cheeky."

[...]

A pigeon chose that diplomatic moment to flutter into the factory and land
on Colon's shoulder, where it promoted him.  [...]

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 187
%passage 4
The wheels clattered over the wood of a drawbridge.

As castles went, this looked as though it could be taken by a small squad
of not very efficient soldiers.  Its builder had not been thinking about
fortifications.  He'd been influenced by fairy tales and possibly by some
of the more ornamental sorts of cake.  It was a castle for looking at.
For defense, putting a blanket over your head might be marginally safer.

The coach stopped in the courtyard.  [...]

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 229
%passage 5
"What a mess," he said.  "Locked-room mysteries are even worse when they
leave the room unlocked."

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 246 ([sic] 'rules for which he termed "the art..."' seems like it
#         ought to have been 'rules for _what_ he termed "the art..."')
%passage 6
He punched the dwarf in the stomach.  This was no time to play by the
Marquis of Fantailler rules.(1)

(1) The Marquis of Fantailler got into many fights in his youth, most of
them as a result of being known as the Marquis of Fantailler, and wrote
a set of rules for which he termed "the noble art of fisticuffs" which
mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren't allowed to hit
him.  Many people were impressed with his work and later stood with noble
chest outthrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against
people who hadn't read the Marquis's book but /did/ know how to knock
people senseless with a chair.  The last words of a surprisingly large
number of people were "Stuff the bloody Marquis of Fantailler--"

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 251
%passage 7
Vimes shivered.  He hadn't realized how warm it had been underground.  Or
what time it was.  There was a dim, a very dim light.  Was this just after
sunset?  What it almost dawn?

The flakes were piling up on his damp clothes, driven by the wind.

Freedom could get you killed.

Shelter ... that was /essential/.  The time of day and a precise location
were of no use to the dead.  They always knew what time it was and where
they were.

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 267
%passage 8
GOOD MORNING.

Vimes blinked.  A tall dark-robed figure was now sitting in the boat.

"Are you Death?"

IT'S THE SCYTHE, ISN'T IT.  PEOPLE ALWAYS NOTICE THE SCYTHE.

"I'm going to die?"

POSSIBLY.

"/Possibly/?  You turn up when people are /possibly/ going to die?"

OH YES.  IT'S QUITE THE NEW THING.  IT'S BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTY
PRINCIPLE.

"What's that?"

I'M NOT SURE.

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 288 [sic: missing 4th '.' at end]
%passage 9
"Are you in charge of the Watch here?"

"No.  That's the job of the Burgermaster."

"And who gives him /his/ orders?"

"Everyone," said Tantony bitterly.  Vimes nodded.  Been there, he thought.
Been there, done that, bought the dublet...

  [The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title The Truth (8)
%passage 1
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!  Who's been
pinching my beer?

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage 1
%passage 2
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.
This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs.  It's also wrong.
There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage 2
# pp. 1-2 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often
spread through Ankh-Morpork since its citizens had learned the words "fire
insurance").

/The dwarfs can turn lead into gold.../

[...]

It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.

"Can we?"

"Damned if I know.  /I/ can't."

"Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say.  /I/ wouldn't say, if /I/ could.

"Can you?"

"No."

"/Ah-ha!/"

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 10 ('mucky' is accurate)
%passage 4
It would seem quite impossible, on such a mucky night, that there could
have been anyone to witness this scene.

But there was.  The universe requires everything to be observed, lest it
cease to exist.

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 19
%passage 5
Very occasionally, a frog was removed from the vivarium and put into a
rather smaller jar where it briefly became a very happy frog indeed, and
then went to sleep and woke up in that great big jungle in the sky.

And thus the university got the active ingredient that it made up into
pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane.  At least, /apparently/
sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU.  In fact he was
incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continually, but by a
remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned, in
that case, that the whole business could be sorted out if only they could
find a formula that caused him to /hallucinate that he was completely
sane/.(1)

This had worked well.  [...]

(1) This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 107-108 ('zis', 'zat', 'vhich', 'Latation' are all accurate)
%passage 6
"Er ... why do you need to work in a darkroom, though?" he said.  "The imps
don't need it, do they?"

"Ah, zis is for my experiment," said Otto proudly.  "You know zat another
term for an iconographer would be 'photographer'?  From the old word
'photus' in Latation, vhich means--"

"To prance around like an idiot ordering everyone about as if you owned the
place," said William.

"Ah, you know it!"

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 100
%passage 7
"Vy are ve stoppink?" said Otto.

"That's Sergeant Detritus on the gate," said William.

"Ah.  A troll.  Very stupid," opined Otto.

"But hard to fool.  I'm afraid we shall have to try the truth."

"Vy vill that vork?"

"He's a policeman.  The truth usually confuses them.  They don't often
hear it."

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 290
%passage 8
Mr. Tulip raised a trembling hand.

"Is this the bit where my whole life passes in front of my eyes?" he said.

NO, THAT WAS THE BIT JUST NOW.

"Which bit?"

THE BIT, said Death, BETWEEN YOU BEING BORN AND YOU DYING.  NO, THIS...
MR. TULIP, THIS IS YOUR WHOLE LIFE AS IT PASSED BEFORE /OTHER PEOPLE'S/
EYES...

  [The Truth, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Thief of Time (8)
%passage 1
"No running with scythes!"

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 24 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
Silver stars weren't awarded frequently, and gold starts happened less
than once a fortnight, and were vied for accordingly.  Right now, Miss
Susan selected a silver star.  Pretty soon Vincent the Keen would have a
galaxy of his very own.  To give him his due, he was quite disinterested
in which kind of star he got.  Quantity, that was what he liked.  Miss
Susan had privately marked him down as Boy Most Likely To Be Killed One
Day By His Wife.

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 53 ('... with the chorus:', '"Do not act...' are separate paragraphs;
#        'challanger' has been cowed after finding out that the little old
#        man he challanged--for entering the dojo--is actually Lu-Tze)
%passage 3
As Lobsang followed the ambling Lu-Tze, he heard the dojo master, who like
all teachers never missed an opportunity to drive home a lesson, say:
"Dojo!  What is Rule One?"

Even the cowering challanger mumbled along with the chorus:

"Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling
man!"

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 74-75 (the novices didn't know that the little old man known as Sweeper
#    	    is actually Lu-Tze; see passage 3 regarding Rule One)
%passage 4
One day a group of senior novices, for mischief, kicked over the little
shrine that Lu-Tze kept beside his sleeping mat.

Next morning, no sweepers turned up for work.  They stayed in their huts
with the doors barred.  After making inquiries, the abbot, who at that time
was fifty years old again, summoned the three novices to his room.  There
were three brooms leaning against the wall.  He spoke as follows:

"You know that the dreadful Battle of Five Cities did not happen because
the messenger got there in time?"

They did.  You learned this early in your studies.  And they bowed
nervously, because this was the abbot, after all.

"And you know then that when the messenger's horse threw a shoe he espied
a man trudging beside the road carrying a small portable forge and pushing
an anvil on a barrow?"

They knew.

"And you know that man was Lu-tze?"

They did.

"Surely you know that Janda Trapp, Grand Master of /Oki-doki/, /Toro-fu/,
and /Chang-fu/, has only ever yielded to one man?"

They knew.

"And you know that man is Lu-Tze?"

They did.

"You know the little shrine you kicked over last night?"

They knew.

"You know it had an owner?"

There was silence.  Then the brightest of the novices looked up at the
abbot in horror, swallowed, picked up one of the three brooms, and walked
out of the room.

The other two were slower of brain and had to follow the story all the way
through to the end.

Then one of them said, "But it was only a sweeper's shrine!"

"You will take up the brooms and sweep," said the abbot, "and you will
sweep every day, and you will sweep until the day you find Lu-Tze and dare
to say 'Sweeper, it was I who knocked over and scattered your shrine and
now I will in humility accompany you to the dojo on the Tenth Djim, in
order to learn the Right Way.'  Only then, if you are still able, may you
resume your studies here.  Understood?"(1)

Older monks sometimes complained, but someone would always say:  "Remember
that Lu-Tze's Way is not our Way.  Remember he learned everything by
sweeping unheeded while students were being educated.  Remember, he has
been everywhere and done many things.  Perhaps he is a little... strange,
but remember he walked into a citadel full of armed men and traps and
nevertheless saw to it that the Pash of Muntab choked innocently on a fish
bone.  No monk is better than Lu-Tze at finding the Time and the Place."

Some, who did not know, would say:  "What is this Way that gives him so
much power?"

And they were told:  "It is the Way of Mrs. Marietta Cosmopolite, 3 Quirm
Street, Ankh-Morpork, Rooms To Rent Very Reasonable.  No, we don't
understand it, either.  Some subsendential rubbish, apparently."

(1) And the story continues:  The novice who had protested that it was only
the shrine of a sweeper ran away from the temple; the student who said
nothing remained a sweeper for the rest of his life; and the student who
has seen the inevitable shape of the story went, after much agonizing and
several months of meticulous sweeping, to Lu-Tze and knelt and asked to be
shown the Right Way.  Whereupon the sweeper took him to the dojo of the
Tenth Djim, with its terrible multibladed fighting machines and its
fearsome serrated weapons such as the /clong-clong/ and the /uppsi/.  The
story runs that the sweeper then opened a cupboard at the back of the dojo
and produced a broom and spake thusly:  "One hand /here/ and the other
/here/, understand?  People never get it right.  Use good, even strokes
and let the broom do most of the work.  Never try to sweep up a big pile,
you'll end up sweeping every bit of dust twice.  Use your dustpan wisely,
and remember:  a small brush for the corners."

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 102 ('coming here':  to the remote mountains where the monks live)
%passage 5
"But did not Wen say that if the truth is anywhere, it is everywhere?" said
Lobsang.

"Well done.  I see you learned /something/, at least.  But one day it
seemed to me that everyone else had decided that wisdom can only be found a
long way off.  So I went to Ankh-Morpork.  They were all coming here, so it
seemed only fair.

"Seeking /enlightenment/?"

"No.  The wise man does not seek enlightenment, he waits for it.  So while
I was waiting, it occurred to me that seeking perplexity might be more
fun," said Lu-Tze.  "After all, enlightenment begins where perplexity ends.
And I found perplexity.  And a kind of enlightenment, too.  I had not been
there for five minutes, for example, when some men in an alley tried to
enlighten me of what little I possessed, giving me a valuable lesson in
the ridiculousness of material things."

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 286 (food in general, and chocolate in particular, has proven to be an
#         effective 'weapon' against Auditors who've taken on human form)
%passage 6
"Let's get up into Zephyr Street," said Susan.

"What is there for us?"

"Wienrich and Boettcher."

"Who are they?"

"I think the original Herr Wienrich and Frau Boettcher died a long time ago.
But the shop still does very good business," said Susan, darting across the
street.  "We need ammunition."

Lady LeJean caught up.

"Oh.  They make chocolate?" she said.

"Does a bear poo in the woods?" said Susan and realized her mistake right
away.(1)

Too late.  Lady LeJean looked thoughtful for a moment.

"Yes," she said at last.  "Yes, I believe that most varieties do, indeed,
excrete, as you suggest, at least in the temperate zones, but there are
several that--"

"I mean to say that, yes, they make chocolate," said Susan.

(1) Teaching small children for any length of time can do this to a
vocabulary.

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 308
%passage 7
Kaos listened to history.

There were new words.  Wizards and philosophers had found Chaos, which is
Kaos with his hair combed and a tie on, and had found in the epitome of
disorder a new order undreamed of.  /There are different kinds of rules./
/From the simple comes the complex, and from the complex comes a different/
/kind of simplicity.  Chaos is order in a mask.../

Chaos.  Not dark, ancient Kaos, left behind by the evolving universe, but
new, shiny Chaos, dancing in the heart of everything.  The idea was
strangely attractive.  And it was a reason to go on living.

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 355 (starts mid-paragraph, with a clause about eating in class omitted)
%passage 8
[...]  Susan [...] took the view that, if there were rules, they applied to
everyone, even her.  Otherwise they were merely tyranny.  But rules were
there to make you think before you broke them.

  [Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
# The Last Hero has never been released in the U.S. (or anywhere?) as a
# conventional mass market paperback.  The large (roughly 10" by 12")
# trade paperback contains many full page color illustrations and most
# text pages include decorations of varying degrees of elaborateness.
# The actual text is probably only novella length.
#
%title The Last Hero (7)
# p. 41 (EOS edition)
%passage 1
Too many people, when listing all the perils to be found in the search
for lost treasure or ancient wisdom, had forgotten to put at the top of
the list 'the man who arrived just before you'.

  [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
# p. 5
# second paragraph is a bit "on the nose" but is too good to leave out
%passage 2
The reason for the story was a mix of many things.  There was humanity's
desire to do forebidden 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, it would all be 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 Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
# p. 19
%passage 3
'And they're /heroes/,' said Mr Betteridge of the Guild of Historians.

'And that means, exactly?' said the Patrician, sighing.

'They're good at doing what they want to do.'

'But they are also, as I understand it, very old men.'

'Very old /heroes/,' the historian corrected him.  'That just means
they've had a lot of /experience/ in doing what they want to do.

Lord Vetinari sighed again.  He did not like to live in a world of
heroes.  You had civilisation, such as it was, and you had heroes.

  [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
# p. 25
%passage 4
They were, all of them, old men.  Their background conversation was
a litany of complaints about feet, stomachs and backs.  They moved
slowly.  But they had a /look/ about them.  It was in their eyes.

Their eyes said that wherever it was, they had been there.  Whatever
it was, they had done it, sometimes more than once.  But they would
never, ever, /buy/ the T-shirt.  And they /did/ know the meaning of
the word 'fear'.  It was something that happened to other people.

  [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
# p. 97
%passage 5
Captain Carrot saluted.  'Force is always the last resort, sir,' he said.

'I believe for Cohen it's the first choice,' said Lord Vetinari.

'He's not too bad if you don't come up behind him suddenly,' said Rincewind.

'Ah, there is the voice of our mission specialist,' said the Patrician.
'I just hope--  What is that on your badge, Captain Carrot?'

'Mission motto, sir,' said Carrot cheerfully.  '/Morituri Nolumus Mori/.
Rincewind suggested it.'

'I imagine he did,' said Lord Vetinari, observing the wizard coldly.
'And would you care to give us a colloquial translation, Mr Rincewind?'

'Er...' Rincewind hesitated, but there really was no escape.  'Er...
roughly speaking, it means, "We who are about to die don't want to", sir.'

  [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
# p. 125 (near top, then continued half way down)
%passage 6
'A good wizard, Rincewind,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.  'Not
particularly bright, but, frankly, I've never been quite happy with
intelligence.  An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.'

Ponder's ears went red.

[...]

'Mr Stibbons was right, was he?' said Ridcully, staring at Ponder.  'How
did you work that out so /exactly/, Mr Stibbons?'

'I, er...' Ponder felt the eyes of the wizards on him.  'I--' He stopped.
'It was a lucky guess, sir.'

The wizards relaxed.  They were extremely uneasy with cleverness, but
lucky guessing was what being a wizard was all about.

  [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
# p. 146
%passage 7
Evil Harry looked down and shuffled his feet, his face a battle between
pride and relief.

'Good of you to say that, lads,' he mumbled.  'I mean, you know, if it
was up to me I wouldn't do this to yer, but I got a reputation to--'

'I said we /understand/,' said Cohen.  'It's just like with us.  You see
a big hairy thing galloping towards you, you don't stop to think:  Is
this a rare species on the point of extinction?  No, you hack its head
off.  'Cos that's heroing, am I right?  An' /you/ see someone, you
betray 'em, quick as a wink.  'Cos that's villaining.'

  [The Last Hero, written by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (1)
%passage 1
The important thing about adventures, thought Mr Bunnsy, was that they
shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes.

  [The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Night Watch (7)
%passage 1
When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend.

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 2-4 (Harper Torch edition; omitted section describes how the student
#          assassin, who has fallen off a booby-trapped shed roof into a
#          cesspit, is on an assignment to try to get into position to
#          target Vimes but not actually attack or try to kill him)
%passage 2
"You're a bit young to be sent on this contract, aren't you?" said Vimes.

"Not a contract, sir," said Jocasta, still paddling.

"Come now, Miss Wiggs.  The price on my head is at least--"

"The Guild council put it in abeyance, sir," said the patient swimmer.
"You're off the register.  They're not accepting contracts on you at
present."

[...]

"And quite a few of the traps drop you into something deadly," said Vimes.

"Lucky for me that I fell into this one, eh, sir?"

"Oh, that one's deadly too," said Vimes.  "/Eventually/ deadly."  He
sighed.  He really wanted to discourage this sort of thing but... they'd
put him off the register?  It wasn't that he'd /liked/ being shot at by
hooded figures in the temporary employ of his many and varied enemies,
but he'd always looked at it as some kind of vote of confidence.  It
showed that he was annoying the rich and arrogant people who ought to be
annoyed.

Besides, the Assassin's Guild was easy to outwit.  They had strict rules,
which they followed quite honorably, and this was fine by Vimes, who, in
certain practical matters, had no rules whatever.

Off the register, eh?  The only other person not on it anymore, it was
rumored, was Lord Vetinari, the Patrician.  The Assassins understood the
political game in the city better than anyone, and if they took you off
the register it was because they felt that your departure would not only
spoil the game but also smash the board.

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 12 (some trainee Watchmen have been taught a marching/running song by
#        Sergeant Detritus, a troll; trolls count "one, two, many, lots"
#        and evidently can't go any higher)
%passage 3
    "/Now we sing dis stupid song!/
    /Sing it as we run along!/
    /Why we sing dis we don't know!/
    /We can't make der words rhyme prop'ly!/"
    "Sound off!"
        "/One!  Two!/"
    "Sound off!"
        "/Many!  Lots!/"
    "Sound off!"
        "/Er... what?/"

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 137
%passage 4
Everyone was guilty of something.  Vimes knew that.  Every copper knew it.
That was how you maintained your authority--everyone, talking to a copper,
was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their
forehead.  You couldn't, of course.  But neither were you supposed to drag
someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they
told you what it was.

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 138 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 5
[...]  Doctor Lawn was wearing a face mask and holding a pair of very long
tweezers in his hand.

"Yes?"

"I'm going out," said Vimes.  "Trouble?"

"Not too bad.  Slidey Harris was unlucky at cards last night, that's all.
Played the ace of hearts."

"That's an unlucky card?"

"It is if Big Tony knows he didn't deal it to you.  But I'll soon have it
removed.  [...]"

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 141 ('it' is a piece of paper concealed inside one of CMOT Dibbler's
#         "meat" pies, partly eaten by Vimes but intended for someone else)
%passage 6
He unfolded it.  In smudged pencil, but still readable, it read:
/Morphic Street, 9 o'clock tonight.  Password: Swordfish/.

Swordfish?  Every password was "swordfish"!  Whenever anyone tried to
think of a word that no one would ever guess, they /always/ chose
"swordfish."  It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind.

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 345 (text actually has "worth more *that* AM$10,000"--obviously a typo)
%passage 7
There were rules.  When you had a Guild of Assassins, there had to be rules
that everyone knew and that were never, ever broken.(1)

An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one--black clothes, hood,
boots, and all.  If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what
could anyone do but spend all day sitting in a small room with a loaded
crossbow pointed at the door?

And they couldn't kill a man incapable of defending himself (although a
man worth more than AM$10,000 a year was considered automatically capable
of defending himself or at least of employing people who were).

And they had to give the target a chance.

(1) Sometimes, admittedly, for a given value of "never."

  [Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title The Wee Free Men (9)
# p. 100 (HarperTempest edition; quin==queen;
#         this rallying cry occurs multiple times; p. 167 has "/Nae quin!
#         Nae king!  Nae laird!  Nae master!  We willna be fooled again!/",
#         p. 193 has same except that King and Quin are reversed and
#         capitalized, p. 287 has "/Nae Quin!  Nae Laird!  Wee Fee Men!/")
%passage 1
"Nac Mac Feegle!  The Wee Free Men!  Nae king!  Nae quin!  Nae laird!  Nae
master!  /We willna be fooled again!/"

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 18-19 (unlike in Lancre and its surrounding Ramtop mountains, witches
#           are unwelcome in the Chalk; the first paragraph continues with
#           mention of things Miss Tick doesn't carry, then things she does,
#           ending with 'and, of course, a lucky charm.')
%passage 2
Miss Tick did not look like a witch.  Most witches don't, at least the ones
who wander from place to place.  Looking like a witch can be dangerous when
you walk among the uneducated.  [...]

Everyone in the country carried lucky charms, and Miss Tick had worked out
that if you didn't have one, people would suspect that you /were/ a witch.
You had to be a bit cunning to be a witch.

Miss Tick did have a pointy hat, but it was a stealth hat and pointed only
when she wanted it to.

The one thing in her bag that might have made anyone suspicious was a very
small, grubby booklet entitled /An Introduction to Escapology, by the
Great Williamson/.  If one of the risks of your job is being thrown into a
pond with your hands tied together, then the ability to swim thirty yards
underwater, fully clothed, plus the ability to lurk under the weeds
breathing air through a hollow reed, count as nothing if you aren't also
/amazingly/ good at knots.

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 29-30 ('pune' is accurate; a mispronunciation of 'pun', as indicated
#            by the footnote; one wonders how a nine year old farm girl knows
#            how to pronounce 'mystique'...)
%passage 3
"My name," she said at last, "is Miss Tick.  And I /am/ a witch.  It's a
good name for a witch, of course."

"You mean blood-sucking parasite?" said Tiffany, wrinkling her forehead.

"I'm sorry," said Miss Tick, coldly.

"Ticks," said Tiffany.  "Sheep get them.  But if you use turpentine--"

"I /meant/ that it /sounds/ like 'mystic,'" said Miss Tick.

"Oh, you mean a pune, or play on words," said Tiffany.(1)  "In that case it
would be even better if you were Miss /Teak/, a dense foreign wood, because
that would sound like 'mystique,' or you could be Miss Take, which would--"

"I can see we're going to get on like a house on fire," said Miss Tick.
"There may be no survivors."

(1) Tiffany had read lots of words in the dictionary that she'd never heard
spoken, so she had to guess at how they were pronounced.

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 64-65
%passage 4
There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overhead and
there was a gibbous moon in the sky.  Tiffany knew it was gibbous because
she'd read in the Almanack that /gibbous/ means what the moon looked like
when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of
paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to
herself, "Ah, I see the moon's very gibbous tonight."

It's possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want
you to know.

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 159 (bigjob: pictsie term for human; 'heid', 'dinna', 'canna', 'noo',
#         'aroound', and 'Tiffan' are accurate)
%passage 5
"[...]  Ye have the First Sight and the Second Thoughts, just like yer
Granny.  That's rare in a bigjob."

"Don't you mean Second Sight?" Tiffany asked.  "Like people who can see
ghosts and stuff?"

"Ach, no.  That's typical bigjob thinking.  /First Sight/ is when you can
see what's really there, not what your heid tells you /ought/ to be there.
Ye saw Jenny, ye saw the horseman, ye saw them as real thingies.  Second
sight is dull sight, it's seeing only what you expect to see.  Most bigjobs
ha' that.  Listen to me, because I'm fadin' noo and there's a lot you dinna
ken.  Ye think this is the whole world?  That is a good thought for sheep
and mortals who dinna open their eyes.  Because in truth there are more
worlds than stars in the sky.  Understand?  They are everywhere, big and
small, close as your skin.  They are /everywhere/.  Some ye can see an'
some ye canna, but there are doors, Tiffan.  They might be a hill or a
tree or a stone or a turn in the road, or they might e'en be a thought in
yer heid, but they are there, all aroound ye.  You'll have to learn to see
'em, because you walk among them and dinna know it.  And some of them...
is poisonous."

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 193 (source text is all italics here; passage continues with the speakers
#         getting in synch and shouting the cry from passage 1)
%passage 6
"They can tak' oour lives but they canna tak' oour troousers!"

"Ye'll tak' the high road an' I'll tak' yer wallet!"

"There can only be one t'ousand!"

"Ach, stick it up yer trakkans!"

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 227 (also all italics; end of a reminiscence of Granny Aching by Tiffany)
%passage 7
"Them as can do has to do for them as can't.  And someone has to speak up
for them as has no voices."

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 287 (like passage 6, this ties back to passage 1; the cry there is
#         one of the things Tiffany hears)
%passage 8
Tiffany might have been the only person, in all the worlds that there are,
to be happy to hear the sound of the Nac Mac Feegle.

They poured out of the smashed nut.  Some were still wearing bow ties.
Some were back in their kilts.  But they were all in a fighting mood and,
to save time, were fighting with one another to get up to speed.

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 313-314 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'mebbe' and 'oour' are accurate)
%passage 9
"[...]  Can you bring Wentworth?"

"Aye."

"And you won't get lost or--or drunk or anything?"

Rob Anybody looked offended.  "We ne'er get lost!" he said.  "We always ken
where we are!  It's just sometimes mebbe we aren't sure where everything
else is, but it's no' our fault if /everything else/ gets lost!  The Nac
Mac Feegle never get lost!"

"What about drunk?" said Tiffany, dragging Roland toward the lighthouse.

"We've ne'er been lost in oour lives!  Is that no' the case, lads?" said
Rob Anybody.  There was a murmur of resentful agreement.  "The words /lost/
and /Nac Mac Feegle/ shouldna turn up in the same sentence!"

"And drunk?" said Tiffany again, laying Roland down on the beach.

"Gettin' lost is something that happens to other people!" declared Rob
Anybody.  "I want to make that point perfectly clear!"

  [The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Monstrous Regiment (8)
%passage 1
'How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don't know how
to use it?'

'Not me, sir.  Other people.  They see the sword and don't attack me,'
said Maladict patiently.

'Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn't be any good with it,' said the
sergeant.

'No, sir.  I'd probably settle for just ripping their heads off, sir.
That's what I mean by protection, sir.  Theirs, not mine.  And I'd get
hell from the League if I did that, sir.'

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 6 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
/There was always a war./  Usually they were border disputes, the national
equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow
too long.  Sometimes they were bigger.  Borogravia was a peace-loving
country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies.  They had
to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn't be fighting
them, eh?  There was always a war.

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 115-116 (plural 'forests' is odd but accurate [1st sentence];
#              so is 'knew' which ought to be 'known' [4th paragraph];
#              9 '0's and 7 '0's are accurate too)
%passage 3
A pigeon rose over the forests, banked slightly, and headed straight for
the valley of the Kneck.

Even from here, the black stone bulk of the Keep was visible, rising above
the sea of trees.  The pigeon sped on, one spark of purpose in the fresh
new morning--

--and squawked as darkness dropped from the sky, gripping it in talons of
steel.  Buzzard and pigeon tumbled for a moment, and then the buzzard
gained a little height and flapped onwards.

The pigeon thought: 000000000.  But had it been more capable of coherent
thought, and knew something about how birds of prey caught pigeons,(1) it
might have wondered why it was being gripped so... kindly.  It was being
held, not squeezed.  As it was, all it could think was 0000000!

(1) And allowing for the fact that all pigeons who knew how birds of prey
catch pigeons are dead, and therefore capable of slightly less thought
than a living pigeon.

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 131
%passage 4
"All the food's been taken but there's carrots and parsnips in a little
garden down the hill a bit," Shufti said as they walked away.

"It'd be s-stealing from the dead," said Wazzer.

"Well, if they object they can hold on, can't they?" said Shufti.  "They're
underground already!"

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 160
%passage 5
"And there you have it, Sergeant Towering," said the lieutenant, turning
to the prisoner.  "Of course, we all know there is some atrocious behavior
in times of war, but it is not the sort of thing we would expect of a
royal prince.(1)  If we are to be pursued because a gallant young soldier
prevented matters from becoming even more disgusting, then so be it."

(1) Lieutenant Blouse read only the more technical history books.

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 176 (fire: almost certainly to make tea)
%passage 6
There are three things a soldier wants to do when there's a respite on the
road.  One involves lighting a cigarette, one involves lighting a fire,
and the other involves no flames at all but does, generally, require a
tree.(1)

(1) Technically, a tree is not required, but seems to be insisted upon for
reasons of style.

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 179 ('humor': American spelling is accurate)
%passage 7
Maladict dropped his crossbow, which fired straight up into the air,(1)
and sat down with his head in his hands.

(1) And failed to hit anything, especially a duck.  This is so unusual
in situations like this that it must be reported under the new humor
regulations.  If it had hit a duck, which quacked and landed on somebody's
head, this would, of course, have been very droll and would certainly have
been reported.  Instead, the arrow drifted in the breeze a little on the
way and landed in an oak tree some thirty feet away, where it missed a
squirrel.

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 284 (soldiers disguised as washerwomen in order to sneak into an
#         enemy-controlled castle have been put to work doing the laundry)
%passage 8
"Look at this, will you?" said Shufti, waving a sodden pair of men's long
pants at her.  "They keep putting the colors in with the whites."

"Well, so what?  These are /enemy/ long johns," said Polly.

"Yes, but there's such a thing as doing it properly!  Look, they put in
this red pair and all the others are going pink."

"And?  I used to love pink when I was about seven."(1)

"But pale pink?  On a man?"

Polly looked at the next tub for a moment and patted Shufti on the shoulder.

"Yes.  It is /very/ pale, isn't it?  You'd better find a couple more red
items," she said.

"But that'll make it even worse--" Shufti began.

"That was an /order/, soldier," Polly whispered in her ear.  "And add some
starch."

"How much?"

"All you can find."

(1) It is an established fact that, despite everything society can do,
girls of seven are magnetically attracted to the color pink.

  [Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title A Hat Full of Sky (11)
# p. 405 (HarperTempest edition)
%passage 1
Why do you go away?  So that you can come back.  So that you can see the
place you came from with new eyes and extra colors.  And the people there
see you differently, too.  Coming back to where you started is not the
same as never leaving.

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 11-12
%passage 2
Miss Tick was a sort of witch finder.  That seemed to be how witchcraft
worked.  Some witches kept a magical lookout for girls who showed promise,
and found them an older witch to help them along.  They didn't teach you
how to do it.  They taught you how to know what you were doing.

Witches were a bit like cats.  They didn't much like one another's company,
but they /did/ like to know where all the other witches were, just in case
they needed them.  And what you might need them for was to tell you, as a
friend, that you were beginning to cackle.

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 31
%passage 3
"Oh," said Miss Tick.  But because she was a teacher as well as a witch,
and probably couldn't help herself, she added, "The funny thing is, of
course, that officially there is no such thing as a white horse.  They're
called gray."(1)

(1) She had to say that because she was a witch and a teacher, and that's
a terrible combination.  They want things to be /right/.  They like things
to be /correct/.  If you want to upset a witch, you don't have to mess
around with charms and spells--you just have to put her in a room with a
picture that's hung slightly crooked and watch her squirm.

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 51
%passage 4
"Oh," she said.  "It's like cat's cradle."

"You've played that, have you?" said Miss Tick vaguely, still
concentrating.

"I can do all the common shapes," said Tiffany.  "The Jewels and the
Cradle and the House and the Flock and the Three Old Ladies, One With a
Squint, Carrying the Bucket of Fish to Market When They Meet the Donkey,
although you need two people for that one, and I only ever did it once,
and Betsy Tupper scratched her nose at the wrong moment and I had to get
some scissors to to cut her loose..."

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 106 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'doon' is accurate)
%passage 5
"[...]  It's a bad case o' the thinkin' he's caught, missus.  When a man
starts messin' wi' the readin' and the writin', then he'll come doon with
a dose o' the thinkin' soon enough.  I'll fetch some o' the lads and we'll
hold his head under water until he stops doin' it--'tis the only cure.  It
can kill a man, the thinkin'."

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 107 ('braked', 'Polis'men', 'dinna' all accurate)
%passage 6
"I never braked my word yet," said Rob.  "Except to Polis'men and other o'
that kidney, ye ken, and they dinna count."

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 111 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'land o' the living': the Nac Mac
#         Feegle believe that they're dead and are on Discworld because it
#         is heaven, also that if they die on Discworld they'll be reborn
#         on their "real world"; 'big wee hag': Tiffany, apprentice witch
#	  [big: she's human, wee: she's still a child, hag: she's a witch])
%passage 7
"[...]  Now lads, ye ken all about hivers.  They cannae be killed!  But
'tis oor duty to save the big wee hag, so this is, like, a sooey-side
mission and ye'll probably all end up back in the land o' the living
doin' a borin' wee job.  So... I'm askin' for volunteers!"

Every Feegle over the age of four automatically put his hand up.

"Oh, come /on/," said Rob.  "You canna /all/ come!  Look, I'll tak'...
Daft Wullie, Big Yan, and you... Awf'ly Wee Billy Bigchin.  An' I'm takin'
no weans, so if yez under three inches high, ye're not comin'!  Except
for ye, o' course, Awf'ly Wee Billy.  As for the rest of youse, we'll
settle this the traditional Feegle way.  I'll tak' the last fifty men
still standing!"

He beckoned the chosen three to a place in the corner of the mound while
the rest of the crowd squared up cheerfully.  A Feegle liked to face
enormous odds all by himself, because it meant you didn't have to look
where you were hitting.

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 114 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 8
[...]  It was a mad, desperate plan, which was very dangerous and risky
and would require tremendous strength and bravery to make it work.

Put like that, they agreed to it instantly.

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 225 (last paragraph continues--they didn't understand the contents
#         since most pictsies can't read)
%passage 9
"Oh, aye?" he said.  "We looked at her diary loads o' times.  Nae harm
done."

"You /looked/ at her /diary/?" said Miss Level, horrified.  "Why?"

Really, she though later, she should have expected the answer.

"Cuz it wuz locked," said Daft Wullie.  "If she didna want anyone tae look
at it, why'd she keep it at the back o' her sock drawer?  [...]"

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 240 (passage starts mid-paragraph; 'frannit' is accurate)
%passage 10
"[...]  All we need tae do is frannit a wheelstone on it and it'll tak' us
right where she is."(1)

(1) If anyone knew what this meant, they'd know a lot more about the Nac
Mac Feegle's way of traveling.

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 351 (the hiver's dialog is telepathic--internal would be more
#         accurate--and occurs in italics without quote marks)
%passage 11
Tiffany took a deep breath.  This was about words, and she knew about
words.  "Here is a story to believe," she said.  "Once we were blobs in
the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys,
and hundreds of things in between.  This hand was once a fin, this hand
once had claws!  In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and
the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow!  Our blood
is as salty as the sea we used to live in!  When we're frightened, the
hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur.  We /are/
history!  Everything we've ever been on the way to becoming us, we still
are.  Would you like to hear the rest of the story?"

/Tell us/, said the hiver.

"I'm made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my
ancestors.  They're in the way I look, in the color of my hair.  And I'm
made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think.  So who
is 'me'?"

  [A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Going Postal (13)
%passage 1
What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of
a finger?  Where was the magic in that?  It was mumbled words and weird
drawings in old books and in the wrong hands it was dangerous as hell,
but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 5 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates
a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably
concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is
going to be hanged.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 18
%passage 3
There is a saying, "You can't fool an honest man," which is much quoted
by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men.  Moist
never tried it, knowingly anyway.  If you did fool an honest man, he
tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder
to buy off.  Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer, and somehow, more
sporting.  And, of course, there were so many more of them.  You hardly
had to aim.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 47 (passage starts mid-paragraph;
#        italics because it's Moist von Lipwig's internal monolog)
%passage 4
/What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch
of government?  Apart from, say, the average voter./

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 137
%passage 5
Now he could see the mysterious order clearly.  They were robed, of course,
because you couldn't have a secret order without robes.  They had pushed
the hoods back now, and each man(1) was wearing a peaked cap with a bird
skeleton wired to it.

(1) Women are always significantly underrepresented in secret orders.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 184 ('Tubso' and 'Bissonomy' are accurate)
%passage 6
Just below the dome, staring down from their niches, were statues of the
Virtues:  Patience, Chastity, Silence, Charity, Hope, Tubso, Bissonomy,(1)
and Fortitude.

(1) Many cultures practice neither of these in the hustle and bustle of
the modern world, because no one can remember what they are.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 249-250 (Moist and Miss Dearheart are in a fancy restaurant)
%passage 7
She froze, staring over his shoulder.  He saw her right hand scrabble
frantically among the cutlery and grab a knife.

"That bastard has just walked into the place!" she hissed.  "Reacher Gilt!
I'll just kill him and join you for the pudding..."

"You can't do that!" hissed Moist.

"Oh?  Why not?"

"You're using the wrong knife!  That's for the fish!  You'll get into
trouble!"

She glared at him, but her hand relaxed, and something like a smile
appeared on her face.

"They don't have a knife for stabbing rich, murdering bastards?" she said.

"They bring it to the table when you order one," said Moist urgently.
"Look, this isn't the Drum, they don't just throw the body into the river!
They'll call the Watch!  Get a grip.  Not on a knife!  And get ready to
run."

"Why?"

"Because I forged his signature on Grand Trunk notepaper to get us in
here, that's why."

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp 260-261 (Mr. Groat: elderly postal employee recently attacked in
#             the palacial but severely dilapidated post office;
#             "his imagination": Moist's; "him": Mr. Groat; "he": Moist)
%passage 8
The vision of Mr. Groat's chest kept bumping insistently against his
imagination.  It looked as though something with claws had taken a swipe
at him, and only the thick uniform coat prevented him from being opened
like a clam.  But that didn't sound like a vampire.  They weren't messy
like that.  It was a waste of good food.

Nevertheless, he picked up a piece of smashed chair.  It had splintered
nicely.  And the nice thing about a stake through the heart was that it
also worked on non-vampires.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 262 (Stanley, a young postal employee who collects pins, recently
#         fought off /something/ using a bag of pins as a weapon)
#         [this passage doesn't have a very satisfactory ending...]
%passage 9
You probably couldn't /kill/ a vampire with pins...

And after a thought like that is when you realize that however hard you
try to look behind you, there's a behind you, behind you, where you aren't
looking.  Moist flung his back to the cold stone wall where he slithered
along it until he ran out of wall and acquired a doorframe.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
#p. 278 ('thoughted' and 'thoughting' are accurate)
%passage 10
"Oh, Mr. Lipwig!"

It is not often that a wailing woman rushes into a room and throws herself
at a man.  It had never happened to Moist before.  Now it happened, and it
seemed such a waste that the woman was Miss Maccalariat.

She tottered forward and clung to the startled Moist, tears streaming down
her face.

"Oh, Mr. Lipwig!" she wailed.  "Oh, Mr. Lipwig!"

Moist reeled under her weight.  She was dragging at his collar so hard
that he was likely to end up on the floor, and the thought of being found
on the floor with Miss Maccalariat was--well, a thought that just couldn't
be thoughted.  The head would explode before thoughting it.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
#p. 315
%passage 11
Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same
crowd that will applaud your beheading.  People like a show.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 326 (homage to "To Have and Have Not"; Lauren Bacall's character says
#         to Humphrey Bogart's character, "You know how to whistle, don't
#         you Steve?  Just put your lips together and--blow."
#         Miss Dearheart's slight pause seems better placed...)
%passage 12
Miss Dearheart stubbed out her cigarette.  "Go up there tonight, Mr. Lipwig.
Get yourself a little bit closer to heaven.  And then get down on your
knees and pray.  You know how to pray, don't you?  You just put your hands
together--and hope."

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 333 ('crackers' have been sending and receiving clandestine clacks
#         messages without owners/operators of the clacks network noticing)
%passage 13
It was a little like stealing.  It was exactly like stealing.  It was, in
fact, stealing.  But there was no law against it, because no one knew the
crime existed, so is it really stealing if what's stolen isn't missed?
And is it stealing if you're stealing from thieves?  Anyway, all property
is theft, except mine.

  [Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Thud! (7)
# p. 39 (Harper Torch edition; passage starts mid-paragraph; speaker is Nobby)
%passage 1
"Why mess about with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?"

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 334-336 (originally transcribed from some other edition)
%passage 2
He wanted to sleep.  He'd never felt this tired before.  Vimes slumped to
his knees, and then fell sideways on to the sand.

When he forced his eyes open, he saw pale stars above him, and had, once
again, the sensation that there was someone else present.

He turned his head, wincing at the stab of pain, and saw a small but
brightly lit folding chair on the sand.  A robed figure was reclining in
it, reading a book.  A scythe was stuck in the sand beside it.

A white, skeletal hand turned a page.

'You'll be Death, then?' said Vimes, after a while.

AH, MISTER VIMES, ASTUTE AS EVER.  GOT IT IN ONE, said Death, shutting the
book on his finger to keep the place.

'I've seen you before.'

I HAVE WALKED WITH YOU MANY TIMES, MISTER VIMES.

'And this is /it/, is it?'

HAS IT NEVER STRUCK YOU THAT THE CONCEPT OF A WRITTEN NARRATIVE IS SOMEWHAT
STRANGE? said Death.

Vimes could tell when people were trying to avoid something they really
didn't want to say, and it was happening here.

'Is it?' he insisted.  'Is this it?  This time I die?'

COULD BE.

'Could be?  What sort of answer is that?' said Vimes.

A VERY ACCURATE ONE.  YOU SEE, YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE,
WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR-/VIMES/ EXPERIENCE.
DON'T MIND ME.  CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING.  I HAVE A BOOK.

Vimes rolled over on to his stomach, gritted his teeth, and pushed himself
on to his hands and knees again.  He managed a few yards before slumping
back down.

He heard the sound of a chair being moved.

'Shouldn't you be somewhere else?' he said.

I AM, said Death, sitting down again.

'But you're here!'

AS WELL. Death turned a page and, for a person without breath, managed a
pretty good sigh.  IT APPEARS THAT THE BUTLER DID IT.

'Did what?'

IT IS A MADE-UP STORY.  VERY STRANGE.  ALL ONE NEEDS TO DO IS TURN TO THE
LAST PAGE AND THE ANSWER IS THERE.  WHAT, THEREFORE, IS THE POINT OF
DELIBERATEDLY NOT KNOWING?

It sounded like gibberish to Vimes, so he ignored it.  Some of the aches
had gone, although his head still hammered.  There was an empty feeling
everywhere.  He just wanted to sleep.

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 225-226
%passage 3
And I'm going home, Vimes repeated to himself.  Everyone wants something
from Vimes, even though I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Hell,
I'm probably a spoon.  Well I'm going to be Vimes, and Vimes reads
/Where's My Cow?/ to Young Sam at six o'clock.  With the noises done right.

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 261-262
%passage 4
Fred Colon peered through the bars.  He was, on the whole, a pretty good
jailer; he always had a pot of tea on the go, he was, as a general rule,
amiably disposed to most people, he was too slow to be easily fooled, and
he kept the cell keys in a box in the bottom drawer of his desk, a long
way out of reach of any stick, hand, dog, cunningly thrown belt, or
trained Klatchian monkey spider.(1)

(1) Making Fred Colon possibly unique in the annals of jail history.

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 287 (American spelling of 'theater' is accurate [Harper Torch edition])
%passage 5
Brushing aside cobwebs with one hand and holding up a lantern with the
other, Sybil led the way past boxes of MEN'S BOOTS, VARIOUS; RISIBLE
PUPPETS, STRING & GLOVE; MODEL THEATER AND SCENERY.  Maybe that was the
reason for their wealth: they bought things that were built to last, and
now they seldom had to buy anything at all.  Except food, of course, and
even then Vimes would not have been surprised to see boxes labeled APPLE
CORES, VARIOUS, or LEFTOVERS, NEED EATING UP.(1)

(1) That was a phrase of Sybil's that got to him.  She'd announce at lunch,
"we must have the pork tonight, it needs eating up."  Vimes never had an
actual problem with this, because he'd been raised to eat what was put in
front of him, and do it quickly, too, before someone else snatched it away.
He was just puzzled at the suggestion that he was there to do the food a
favor.

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 296-297
%passage 6
"Tell me Drumknott, are you a betting man at all?"

"I have been know to have the occasional 'little flutter,' sir."

"Given, then, a contest between an invisible and very powerful quasidemonic
/thing/ of pure vengence on the one hand, and the commander on the other,
where would you wager, say... one dollar?"

"I wouldn't, sir.  That looks like one that would go to the judges."

"Yes," said Vetinari, staring thoughtfully at the closed door.  "Yes,
/indeed/."

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 351 ('teeth-aching' probably ought to have been 'teeth-achingly')
%passage 7
Vimes reached up and took a mug of water from Angua.  It was teeth-aching
cold and the best drink he'd ever tasted.  And his mind worked fast, flying
in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a
huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened
and, if it had happened, hadn't happened very much.

It was all mystic, that's what it was.  Oh, it /might/ all be true, but how
could you ever tell?  You had to stick to the things you can see.  And you
had to keep reminding yourself of that, too.

Yeah, that was it.  What had really happened, eh?  A few signs?  Well,
anything can look like you want it to, if you're worried and confused
enough, yes?  A sheep can look like a cow, right?  Ha!

  [Thud!, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Wintersmith (16)
# p. 82 (HarperTeen edition--presumably HarperTempest suffered a name change)
%passage 1
That's Third Thoughts for you.  When a huge rock is going to land on your
head, they're the thoughts that think:  Is that an igneous rock, such as
granite, or is it sandstone?

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
p. 113
%passage 2
They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but
has anyone checked lately?

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 32-33
%passage 3
All witches are a bit odd.  Tiffany had got used to odd, so that odd seemed
quite normal.  There was Miss Level, for example, who had two bodies,
although one of them was imaginery.  Mistress Pullunder, who bred pedigreed
earthworms and gave them all names... well, she was hardly odd at all, just
a bit peculiar, and anyway earthworms were quite interesting in a basically
uninterestng kind of way.  And there had been Old Mother Dismass, who
suffered from bouts of temporal confusion, which can be quite strange when
it happens to a witch; her mouth never moved in time with her words, and
sometimes her footsteps came down the stairs ten minutes before she did.

But when it came to odd, Miss Treason didn't just take the cake, but a
packet of biscuits too, with sprinkles on the top, and also a candle.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 34 ('villages': plural is accurate; 'clonk-clank' is rendered bold)
%passage 4
Then there was her clock.  It was heavy and made of rusty iron by someone
who was more blacksmith than watchmaker, which was why it went
*clonk-clank* instead of /tick-tock/.  She wore it on her belt and could
tell the time by feeling the stubby little hands.

There was a story in the villages that the clock was Miss Treason's heart,
which she'd used ever since her first heart died.  But there were lots of
stories about Miss Treason.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 40 (Boffo)
%passage 5
First Sight and Second Thoughts, that's what a witch had to rely on: First
Sight to see what's really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First
Thoughts to check that they were thinking right.  Then there were the
Third Thoughts, which Tiffany had never heard discussed and therefore kept
quiet about; they were odd, seemed to think for themselves, and didn't
turn up very often.  And they were telling her that there was more to Miss
Treason than met the eye.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 53-54 (in Carpe Jugulum, most of the lore [for humans] about how to kill
#           vampires had been written by long-lived/long-not-defunct vampires
#           [meaning that it was deliberately full of inaccuracies...])
%passage 6
It was in fact Miss Tick who had written /Witch Hunting for Dumb People/,
and she made sure that copies of it found their way into those areas where
people still believed that witches should be burned or drowned.

Since the only witch ever likely to pass through these days was Miss Tick
herself, it meant that if things did go wrong, she'd get a good night's
sleep and a decent meal before being thrown into the water.  The water was
no problem at all for Miss Tick, who had been to the Quirm College for
Young Ladies, where you had to have an icy dip every morning to build Moral
Fiber.  And a No. 1 Bosun's knot was very easy to undo with your teeth,
even underwater.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 55-56
%passage 7
Working quickly, she emptied her pockets and started a shamble.

Shambles worked.  That was about all you could say about them for certain.
You made them out of some string and a couple of sticks and anything you
had in your pocket at the time.  They were a witch's equivalent of those
knives with fifteen blades and three screwdrivers and a tiny magnifying
glass and a thing for extracting earwax from chickens.

You couldn't even say precisely what they did, although Miss Tick thought
that they were a way of finding out what things the hidden bits of your
own mind already knew.  You had to make a shamble from scratch every time,
and only from things in your pockets.  There was no harm in having
interesting things in your pockets, though, just in case.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 69
%passage 8
A witch didn't do things because they seemed like a good idea at the time!
That was practically cackling!  You had to deal every day with people who
were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you
could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably
improved if you gave them a slap.  But you didn't because, as Miss Tick
had once explained: a) it would make the world a better place for only a
very short period of time; b) it would then make the world a slightly
worse place; and c) you're not supposed to be as stupid as they are.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 106 (Rob Anybody is married to their kelda, ruler of the clan;
#         passage continues with three or so pages about Explaining
#         [focusing on the reactions of the recipient of the explanation:
#         Pursin' o' the Lips; Foldin' o' the Arms; Tappin' o' the Feets;
#         and also the reactions of the listening Feegles as they hear
#         about them] but would end up on the long side if included here)
%passage 9
"Aye, but the boy willna be interested in marryin'," said Slightly Mad
Angus.

"He might be one day," said Billy Bigchin, who'd made a hobby of watching
humans.  "Most bigjob men get married."

"They do?" said a Feegle in astonishment.

"Oh, aye."

"They want tae get married?"

"A lot o' them do, aye," said Billy.

"So there's nae more drinkin', and stealin', and fightin'?"

"Hey, ah'm still allowed some drinkin' and stealin' and fightin'!" said
Rob Anybody.

"Aye, Rob, but we canna help noticin' ye also have tae do the Explainin',
too." said Daft Wullie.

There was a general nodding from the crowd.  To Feegles, Explaining was a
dark art.  It was just so /hard/.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 126-127 (passage starts mid-paragraph;
#             witches know in advance when they're going to die)
%passage 10
"[...]  We shall hold the funeral tomorrow afternoon."

"Sorry?  You mean /before/ you die?" said Tiffany.

"Why, of course!  I don't see why I shouldn't have some fun!"

"Good thinkin'!" said Rob Anybody.  "That's the kind o' sensible detail
people usually fails tae consider."

"We call it a going-away party," said Miss Treason.  "Just for witches, of
course.  Other people tend to get a bit nervous--I can't think why.  And
on the bright side, we've got that splendid ham that Mr. Armbinder gave us
last week for settling the ownership of the chestnut tree, and I'd love to
try it."

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 129
%passage 11
Some people think that "coven" is a word for a group of witches, and it's
true that's what the dictionary says.  But the real word for a group of
witches is an "argument."

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 174-175  (passage starts mid-paragraph; last paragraph continues, but
#         changes topic so abruptly Tiffany gasps; 'rumbustious' is accurate)
%passage 12
"[...]  And now I shall tell you something vitally important.  It is the
secret of my long life."

Ah, thought Tiffany, and she leaned forward.

"The important thing," said Miss Treason, "is to stay the passage of the
wind.  You should avoid rumbustious fruits and vegetables.  Beans are the
worst, take it from me."

"I don't think I understand--" Tiffany began.

"Try not to fart, in a nutshell."

"In a nutshell, I imagine it would be pretty unpleasant!" said Tiffany
nervously.  She couldn't believe she was being told this.

"This is no joking matter," said Miss Treason.  "The human body has only
so much air in it.  You have to make it last.  One plate of beans can take
a year off your life.  I have avoided rumbustiousness all my days.  I am
an old person and that means what I say is wisdom!"  She gave the
bewildered Tiffany a stern look.  "Do you understand, child?"

Tiffany's mind raced.  Everything is a test!  "No," she said.  "I'm not a
child and that's nonsense, not wisdom!"

The stern look cracked into a smile.  "Yes," said Miss Treason.  "Total
gibberish.  But you've got to admit it's a corker, all the same, right?
You definitely believed it, just for a moment?  The villagers did last
year.  You should have seen the way they walked about for a few weeks!
The strained looks on their faces quite cheered me up!  [...]"

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 185 (Miss Treason tells people she's 113, but she's actually /only/ 111)
%passage 13
MISS EUMENIDES TREASON, AGED ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN?

Tiffany heard the voice inside her head.  It didn't seem to have come
through her ears.  And she'd heard it before, making her quite unusual.
Most people hear the voice of Death only once.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 229
%passage 14
Tiffany had looked up "strumpet" in the Unexpurgated Dictionary, and found
it meant "a woman who is no better than she should be" and "a lady of easy
virtue."  This, she decided after some working out, meant that Mrs. Gytha
Ogg, known as Nanny, was a very respectable person.  She found virtue easy,
for one thing.  And if she was no better than she should be, she was just
as good as she ought to be.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 360-361 ('wurds' is accurate)
%passage 15
"An heroic effect, Mr. Anybody," said Granny.  "The first thing a hero must
conquer is his fear, and when it comes to fightin', the Nac Mac Feegle
don't know the meanin' of the word."

"Aye, true enough," Rob grunted.  "We dinna ken the meanin' o' thousands
o' wurds!"

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 398-399 ("Chumsfanleigh" is pronounced "Chuffley")
%passage 16
At the back of the Feegles' chalk pit, more chalk had been carved out of
the wall to make a tunnel about five feet high and perhaps as long.

In front of it stood Roland de Chumsfanleigh (it wasn't his fault).  His
ancestors had been knights, and they had come to own the Chalk by killing
the kings who thought they did.  Swords, that's what it had all been about.
Swords and cutting off heads.  That was how you got land in the old days,
and then the rules were changed so that you didn't need a sword to own
land anymore, you just needed the right piece of paper.  But his ancestors
had still hung on to their swords, just in case people thought that the
whole thing with the bits of paper had been unfair, it being a fact that
you can't please everybody.

He'd always wanted to be good with a sword, and it had come as a shock to
find that they were so /heavy/.  He was great at air sword.  In front of a
mirror he could fence against his reflection and win nearly all the time.
Real swords didn't allow that.  You tried to swing them and they ended up
swinging you.  He'd realized that maybe he was more cut out for bits of
paper.  Besides, he needed glasses, which could be a bit tricky under a
helmet, especially if someone was hitting /you/ with a sword.

  [Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Making Money (17)
# p. 187 (Harper edition -- what's become of Harper Torch?)
%passage 1
"I'm an Igor, thur.  We don't athk quethtionth."

"Really?  Why not?"

"I don't know, thur.  I didn't athk."

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 177 (originally transcribed from some other edition; Harper edition
#         uses American spelling for "armor")
#        [some off-duty Watchmen moonlight as bank security guards]
%passage 2
The Watch armor he'd lifted from the bank's locker room fitted like a
glove.  He'd have preferred it to fit like a helmet and breastplate.
But, in truth, it probably didn't look any better on its owner, currently
swanking along the corridors in the bank's own shiny but impractical armor.
It was common knowledge that the Watch's approach to uniforms was one-size-
doesn't-exactly-fit-anybody, and that Commander Vimes disapproved of armor
that didn't have that kicked-by-trolls look.  He liked armor to state
clearly that it had been doing its job.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 108 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 3
"[...]  The world is full of things worth more than gold.  But we dig the
damn stuff up and then bury it in a different hole.  Where's the sense in
that?  What are we, magpies?  Good heavens, /potatoes/ are worth more than
gold!"

"Surely not!"

"If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag
of potatoes or a bag of gold?"

"Yes, but a desert island isn't Ankh-Morpork!"

"And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right?
It's just a dream.  But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere.  Add
a knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you've got a meal, /anywhere/.
Bury gold in the ground and you'll be worrying about thieves forever.
Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a
thousand per cent."

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 22-24 (Albert Spangler is one of Moist Lipwig's aliases;
#            'dyslectic' is accurate)
%passage 4
"Let us talk about angels," said Lord Vetinari.

"Oh yes, I know that one," said Moist bitterly.  "I've heard that one.
That's the one you got me with after I was hanged--"

Vetinari raised an eyebrow.  "Only mostly hanged, I think you'll find.  To
within an inch of your life."

"Whatever!  I was hanged!  And the worst part of that was finding out I
only got two paragraphs in the /Tanty Bugle/!(1)  Two paragraphs, may I
say, for a life of ingenious, inventive, and strictly nonviolent crime?
I could have been an example to the youngsters!  Page one got hogged by
the Dyslectic Alphabet Killer, and he only maanaged A and W!"

"I confess the editor does appear to believe that it is not a proper crime
unless someone is found in three alleys at once, but that is the price of
a free press.  And it suits us both, does it not, that Albert Spangler's
passage from this world was... unmemorable?"

"Yes, but I wasn't expecting an afterlife like this!  I have to do what
I'm told for the rest of my life?"

"Correction, your new life.  That is a crude summary, yes," said Vetinari.
"Let me rephrase things, however.  Ahead of you, Mr. Lipwig, is a life of
respectable quiet contentment, of civic dignity, and, of course, in the
fullness of time, a pension.  Not to mention, of course, the proud gold-ish
chain."

Moist winced at this.  "And if I /don't/ do what you say?"

"Hmm?  Oh, you misunderstand me, Mr. Lipwig.  That is what will happen to
you if you decline my offer.  If you accept it, you will survive on your
wits against powerful and dangerous enemies, with every day presenting
fresh challanges.  Someone may even try to kill you."

"What?  Why?"

"You annoy people.  A hat goes with the job, incidentally."

(1) A periodical published throughout the Plains, noted for its coverage
of murder (preferably 'orrible) trials, prison escapes, and the world that
in general is surrounded by a chalk outline.  Very popular.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
#p. 71
%passage 5
When he got back to the Post Office, Moist looked up the Lavish family in
/Whom's Whom/.  They were indeed what was known of as "old money," which
meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had
originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant.  Funny,
that:  a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a
slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to
boast of over the port.  Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and
/rogue/ was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 72 ('clacks' is a communication system, here analogous to a telegraph)
%passage 6
He spotted the flimsy pink clacks among the other stuff and tugged it out
quickly.

It was from Spike!

He read:

    SUCCESS.  RETURNING DAY AFTER TOMMOROW.
    ALL WILL BE REVEALED.  S.

Moist put it down carefully.

Obviously she'd missed him terribly and was desperate to see him again, but
she was stingy about spending Golem Trust money.  Also, she'd probably run
out of cigarettes.

Moist drummed his fingers on the desk.  A year ago he'd asked Adora Belle
Dearheart to be his wife, and she'd explained that, in fact, he was going
to be her husband.

It was going to be... well, it was going to be sometime in the near future,
when Mrs. Dearheart finally lost patience with her daughter's busy schedule
and arranged the wedding herself.

But he was a nearly married man, however you looked at it.  And nearly
married men didn't get mixed up with the Lavish family.  A nearly married
man was steadfast and dependable and always ready to hand his nearly wife
an ashtray.  He had to be there for his oneday children, and make sure
they slept in a well-ventilated nursery.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 79 (passage starts mid-paragraph; departed Mrs. Lavish is a bank owner)
%passage 7
"[...]  Now what, Mr. Death?"

NOW? said Death.  NOW, YOU COULD SAY, COMES... THE AUDIT.

"Oh.  There is one, is there?  Well, I'm not ashamed."

THAT COUNTS.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 183-184 (American spelling of 'gray' is accurate)
%passage 8
Moist lit the lamp and walked over to the battered wreckage of his wardrobe.
Once again he selected the tatty gray suit.  It had sentimental value; he
had been hanged in it.  And it was an unmemorable suit for an unmemorable
man, with the additional advantage, unlike black, of not showing up in the
dark.(1)  [...]

(1) Every assassin knew that real black often stood out in the dark,
because the night in the city is usually never full black, and that gray
or green merge much better.  But they wore black anyway, because style
trumps utility every time.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 218 (the Cabinet of Curiosity)
%passage 9
"All right, then," said Moist, "/what does it do/?"

"We don't know."

"How does it work?"

"We don't know."

"Where did it come from?"

"We don't know."

"Well, that seems to be all," said Moist sarcastically.  "Oh no, one last
one:  what is it?  And let me tell you, I'm agog."

"That may be the wrong sort of question to ask," said Ponder, shaking his
head.  "Technically it appears to be a classic Bag of Holding but with /n/
mouths, where /n/ is the number of items in an eleven-dimensional universe,
which are not currently alive, not pink, and can fit in a cubical drawer
14.14 inches on a side, divided by P."

"What's P?"

"That may be the wrong sort of question."

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 225 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 10
"[...]  I'll talk to Dr. Hicks.  He's the head of the Department of
Postmortem Communications."

"Postmortem Com..." Moist began.  "Isn't that the same as necroman--"

"I said the /Department of Postmortem Communications/," said Ponder very
firmly.  [...]

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 247 (it's a spirit summoned by Dr. Hicks that is describing the art/risk)
%passage 11
"Necromancy is a fine art?" said Moist.

"None finer, young man.  Get things just a tiny bit wrong and the spirits
of the vengeful dead may enter your head via your ears and blow your brains
out down your nose."

The eyes of Moist and Adora Belle focused on Dr. Hicks like those of an
archer on his target.  He waved his hands frantically and mouthed, "Not
very often!"

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 269
%passage 12
"If you can't stand the heat, get off the pot, that's what I always say,"
said a senior clerk, and there was a general murmur of agreement.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 264 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 13
[...] if the fundamental occult maxim "as above, so below" was true, then
so was "as below, so above"...

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 280
%passage 14
"In the Old Country we have a thaying," Igor volunteered.

"A what?"

"A thaying.  We thay, 'if you don't want the monthter you don't pull the
lever.'"

"You don't think I've gone mad, do you, Igor?"

"Many great men have been conthidered mad, Mr. Hubert.  Even Dr. Hanth
Forvord wath called mad.  But I put it to you:  could a madman have created
a revolutionary living-brain extractor?"

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 302
%passage 15
There was a saying:  "Old necromancers never die."  When he told them this,
people would say "... and?" and Hicks would have to reply, "That's all of
it, I'm afraid.  Just 'Old necromancers never die.'"

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 336 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 16
[...]  What the iron maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to
Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,(1) far less messy,
considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to /force/ people
to climb inside the iron maiden.

(1) The only real expense was tea and biscuits halfway through, which
seldom happened with the iron maiden.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 361 (Mr. Slant is a zombie)
%passage 17
"Mrs. Lavish, a lady many of us were privileged to know, recently confided
in me that she was dying," said Vetinari.  "She asked me for advice on the
future of the bank, given that her obvious heirs were, in her words, 'as
nasty a bunch of weasels as you could ever hope not to meet--'"

All thirty-one of the Lavish lawyers stood up and spoke at once, incuring
a total cost to clients of $AM119.28p.

Mr. Slant glared at them.

Mr. Slant did not, despite what had been said, have the respect of Ankh-
Morpork's legal profession.  He commanded its fear.  Death had not
diminished his encyclopedic memory, his guile, his talent for corkscrew
reasoning, and the vitriol of his stare.  Do not cross me this day, it
advised the lawyers.  Do not cross me, for if you do I will have the flesh
from your very bones and the marrow therein.  You know those leather-bound
tomes you have on the wall behind your desks to impress your clients?  I
have read them all, and wrote half of them.  Do not try me.  I am not in a
good mood.

One by one, they sat down.(1)

(1) Total cost, including time and disbursements: $AM253.16p.

  [Making Money, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Unseen Academicals (12)
# p. 68 (Harper edition)
%passage 1
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.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 1 (footnote, so "(1)" ought to be "(2)", but somebody would complain...)
%passage 2
Technically, the city of Ankh-Morpork is a Tyranny, which is not always
the same thing as a monarchy, and in fact even the post of Tyrant has been
somewhat redefined by the incumbent, Lord Vetinari, as the only form of
democracy that works.  Everyone is entitled to vote, unless disqualified
by reason of age or not being Lord Vetinari.

And yet it does work.  This has annoyed a number of people who feel,
somehow, that it should not work, and who want a monarch instead, thus
replacing a man who has achieved his position by cunning, a deep
understanding of the realities of the human psyche, breathtaking
diplomancy, a certain prowess with the stiletto dagger, and, all agree,
a mind like a finely balanced circular saw, with a man who has got there
by being born.(1)

However, the crown has hung on anyway, as crowns do--on the Post Office
and the Royal Bank and the Mint and, not least, in the sprawling,
brawling, squalling consciousness of the city itself.  Lots of things
live in that darkness.  There are all kinds of darkness, and all kinds
of things can be found in them, imprisoned, banished, lost or hidden.
Sometimes they escape.  Sometimes they simply fall out.  Sometimes they
just can't take it any more.

(1) A third proposition, that the city be governed by a choice of
respectable members of the community who would promise not to give
themselves airs or betray the public trust at every turn, was instantly
the subject of music hall jokes all over the city.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 16
%passage 3
A wizard could do what he liked in his own study, and in the old days that
had largely meant smoking anything he fancied and farting hugely without
apologizing.  These days it meant building out into a congruent set of
dimensions.  Even the Archchancellor was doing it, which made it hard for
Ponder to protest:  he had half a mile of trout stream in his bathroom,
and claimed that messin' about in his study was what kept a wizard out
of mischief.  And, as everyone knew, it did.  It generally got him into
trouble instead.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 18 (Ridcully is furious at the former Dean, who left UU to become a
#        rival [Arch-]Chancellor at Brazeneck University in Pseudopolis)
%passage 4
"Remuneration?  Since when did a wizard work for wages?  We are pure
academics, Mister Stibbons!  We do not care for mere money!"

Unfortunately, Ponder was a clear logical thinker who, in times of mental
confusion, fell back on reason and honesty, which, when dealing with an
angry Archchancellor, were, to use the proper academic term, unhelpful.
And he neglected to think strategically, always a mistake when talking to
fellow academics, and as a result made the mistake of employing, as at
this point, common sense.

"That's because we never actually pay for anything very much," he said,
"and if anyone needs any petty cash they just help themselves from the
big jar--"

"We are part of the very fabric of the university, Mister Stibbons!  We
take only what we require!  We do not seek wealth!  And most certainly
we do not accept a 'post of vital importance which includes an attractive
package of remuneration,' whatever the hells that means, 'and other
benefits including a generous pension!'  A pension, mark you!  When has a
wizard ever retired?"

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 19 (She: plump Glenda; Her: fashion-model-to-be Juliet)
%passage 5
She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had
clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her.(1)

(1) The Egregious Professor of Grammar and Usage would have corrected
this to "she was not she," which would have caused the Professor of Logic
to spit out his drink.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 48 (He: Nutt, a key element of the story who doesn't figure in any
#        of the other selected passages...)
%passage 6
He'd tried wandering around the other cellars, but there was nothing much
happening at night, and people gave him funny looks.  Ladyship did not
rule here.  But wizards are a messy lot and nobody tidied up much and
lived to tell the tale, so all sorts of old storerooms and junk-filled
workshops became his for the use of.  And there was so much for a lad with
keen night vision to find.  He had already seen some luminous spoon ants
carrying a fork, and, to his surprise, the forgotten mazes were home to
that very rare indoorovore, the Uncommon Sock Eater.  There were some
things living up in the pipes, too, which periodically murmured "Awk! Awk!"
Who knew what strange monsters made there home here?

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 58
%passage 7
Truth is female, since truth is beauty rather than handsomeness; this,
Ridcully reflected as the Council grumbled in, would certainly explain
the saying that a lie could run around the world before Truth got its,
correction, /her/ boots on, and since she would have to choose which
pair--the idea that any woman in the position to choose would have just
one pair of boots being beyond rational belief.  Indeed, as a goddess she
would have lots of shoes, and thus many choices:  comfy shoes for home
truths, hobnail boots for unpleasant truths, simple clogs for universal
truths and possibly some kind of slipper for self-evident truth.  More
important right now was what kind of truth he was going to have to impart
to his colleagues, and he decided not on the whole truth, but instead on
nothing but the truth, which dispensed with the need for honesty.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 166 (see "the wrong sort of question" passage from /Making Money/
#         for a description of the Cabinet; items removed from it have to
#         be returned within 14:14 hours or they're drawn back magically;
#         student in question had removed a sandwich and then eaten it)
%passage 8
"Yes, sir?" said Ponder wearily.

"Promote him.  Whatever level he is, move him up one."

"I think that'll send the wrong kind of signal," Ponder tried.

"On the contrary, Mister Stibbons.  It will send exactly the right kind of
message to the student body."

"But he disobeyed an express order, may I point out?"

"That's right.  He showed independent thinking and a certain amount of
pluck, and in the course of so doing added valuable data to our
understanding of the Cabinet."

"But he might have destroyed the whole university, sir."

"Right, in which case he would have been vigorously disciplined, if we'd
been able to find anything left of him.  But he didn't and he was lucky
and we need lucky wizards.  Promote him, on the direct order of me, not
pp'd at all.  Incidentally, how loud were his screams?"

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 192-193 ('pants': underpants; 'football': soccer ;-)
%passage 9
"You will arrange yourself into two teams, set up goals, and strive to win!
No man will leave the field of play unless injured!  The hands are not to
be used, is that clear?  Any questions?"  A hand went up.  Ridcully sought
the attached face.

"Ah, Rincewind," he said, and, because he was not a determinedly unpleasant
man, amended this to, "Professor Rincewind, of course."

"I would like permission to fetch a note from my mother, sir."

Ridcully sighed.  "Rincewind, you once informed me, to my everlasting
puzzlement, that you never knew your mother because she ran away before
you were born.  Distinctly remember writing it down in my diary.  Would
you like another try?"

"Permission to go and find my mother?"

Ridcully hesitated.  The Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography had no
students and no real duties other than to stay out of trouble.  Although
Ridcully would never admit it, it was against all reason an emeritus
position.  Rincewind was a coward and an unwitting clown, but he had
several times saved the world in slightly puzzling circumstances.  He was
a luck sink, the Archchancellor decided, doomed to being a lightning rod
for the fates so that everyone else didn't have to.  Such a person was
worth all his meals and laundry (including an above-average level of
soiled pants) and a bucket of coal every day even if he was, in Ridcully's
opinion, a bit of a whiner.  However, he was fast, and therefore useful.

"Look," said Rincewind, "a mysterious urn turns up and suddenly it's all
about football.  That bodes.  It means that something bad is going to
happen."

"Come now, it could be something wonderful," Ridcully protested.

Rincewind appeared to give this due consideration.  "Could be wonderful,
will be dreadful.  Sorry, that's how it goes."

"This is Unseen University, Rincewind.  What is there to fear?" Ridcully
said.  "Apart from me, of course.  Good heavens, this is a sport."  He
raised his voice.  "Arrange yourselves into two teams and play football!"

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 268 (passage starts mid-paragraph; Glenda is cleaning UU's Night Kitchen)
%passage 10
[...]  If you wanted a job done properly, you had to do it yourself.
Juliet's verison of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say
it was erratic, past all understanding and seldom seen.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 358-359
%passage 11
"Well, big day, lads!" said Ridcully.  "Looks like there's going to be a
nice day for it as well.  They're all over there waiting for us to give
them a show.  I want you to approach this in the best traditions of Unseen
University sportsmanship, which is to cheat whenever you are unobserved,
though I fear that the chance of anyone being unobserved today is remote.
But in any case, I want you to give it one hundred and ten percent."

"Excuse me, Archchancellor," said Ponder Stibbons.  "I understand the
sense of what you are saying, but there is only one hundred percent."

"Well, they could give it one hundred and ten percent if they tried
harder," said Ridcully.

"Well, yes and no, sir.  But, in fact, that would mean that you had just
made the one hundred percent bigger while it would still be one hundred
percent.  Besides, there is only so fast a man can run, only so high a man
can jump.  I just wanted to make the point."

"Good point, well made," said Ridcully, dismissing it instantly.  [...]

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 363 (more lyrics occur later on; they're generally about using
#         economics to conquer any opposition)
%passage 12
The singing of the National Anthem was always a ragged affair, the good
people of Ankh-Morpork feeling that it was unpatriotic to sing songs about
how patriotic you were, taking the view that someone singing a song about
how patriotic they were was either up to something or a Head of State.(1)

An additional problem today lay in the acoustics of the arena, which were
rather too good, coupled with the fact that the speed of sound at one end
of the stadium was slightly offbeat compared with the other end, a
drawback exacerbated when both sides tried to recover the gap.

These acoustical anomalies did not count for much if you were standing
next to Mustrum Ridcully, as the Archchancellor was one of those gentleman
who will sing it beautifully, correctly enunciated and very, very loudly.

"'When dragons belch and hippos flee, my thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of
thee.'" he began.

(1) i.e., up to something.

  [Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title I Shall Wear Midnight (13)
# p. 447 (Harper edition; this passage is a quote from the "Authur's Note",
#         three extra pages after the conclusion of the story; there is a
#         similar, slightly shorter version of this in the text on p. 236,
#         where it's preceded by "The past needs to be remembered." but
#         lacks the final 'going wrong' sentence)
%passage 1
It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not
know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you
don't know where you are, you don't know where you're going.  And if you
don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 429-430 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
%passage 2
"[...]  There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could
change the past.  Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that
when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having. [...]"

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 2 (passage starts mid-paragraph; scene is a village fair)
%passage 3
[...]  And so here, [...], you heard the permanent scream of, well,
everyone.  It was called having fun.  The only people not making any noise
were the thieves and pickpockets, who went about their business with
commendable silence, and they didn't come near Tiffany; who would pick a
witch's pocket?  You would be lucky to get all your fingers back.  At
least, that's what they feared, and a sensible witch would encourage them
in this fear.

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 61
%passage 4
/The hare runs into the fire./

Had she seen that written down anywhere?  Had she heard it as part of a
song?  A nursery rhyme?  What had the hare got to do with anything?  But
she was a witch, after all, and there was a job to do.  Mysterious omens
could wait.  Witches knew that mysterious omens were around all the time.
The world was always very nearly drowning in mysterious omens.  You just
had to pick the one that was convenient.

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 64
%passage 5
That was the thing about thoughts.  They thought themselves, and then
dropped into your head in the hope that you would think so too.  You had
to slap them down, thoughts like that; they would take a witch over if she
let them.  And then it would all break down, and nothing would be left but
the cackling.

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 65 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 6
"[...]  It just so happens that I was passing by, ye ken, and not
following ye at all.  One of them coincidences."

"There have been a lot of those coincidences lately," said Tiffany.

"Aye," said Rob, grinning, "it must be another coincidence."

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 179-180
%passage 7
Tiffany cleared her throat.  "Well," she said, "I suppose Rob Anybody would
tell you that there are times when promises should be kept and times when
promises should be broken, and it takes a Feegle to know the difference."

Mrs. Proust grinned hugely.  "You could almost be from the city, Miss
Tiffany Aching."

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 183 (Wee Mad Arthur is a member of the Ankh-Morpork Watch; he was a
#         foundling raised by gnomes and didn't know he was a Feegle until
#         he met with the ones accompanying Tiffany)
%passage 8
Despite himself, Wee Mad Arthur was grinning.  "Have you boys got no shame?"

Rob Anybody matched him grin for grin.  "I couldna say," he replied, "but
if we have, it probably belonged tae somebody else."

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 219 (footnote)
%passage 9
There is a lot of folklore about equestrian statues, especially the ones
with riders on them.  There is said to be a code in the number and
placement of the horse's hooves:  If one of the horse's hooves is in the
air, the rider was wounded in battle; two legs in the air means that the
rider was killed in battle; three legs in the air indicates that the
rider got lost on the way to the battle; and four legs in the air means
that the sculptor was very, very clever.  Five legs in the air means that
there's probably at least one other horse standing behind the one you're
looking at; and the rider lying on the ground with his horse lying on top
of him with all four legs in the air means that the rider was either a
very incompetent horseman or owned a very bad-tempered horse.

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 318 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
%passage 10
[...]  "Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter is
mass, and mass changes time and space." [...]

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 362 (passage starts mid-paragraph; speaker is Preston, a castle guard;
#         quote is a parody of J.R.R.Tolkien's "Do not meddle in the affairs
#         of wizards, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.")
%passage 11
[...]  "My granny said, 'Don't meddle in the affairs of witches because
they clout you around the ear.'"

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 386-387 (Tiffany is trying to rescue some witches from a castle roof)
%passage 12
Tiffany crawled a little farther, well aware of the sheer drop an inch
away from her hand.  "Preston has gone to fetch a rope.  Do you have a
broomstick?"

"A sheep crashed into it," said Mrs. Proust.

Tiffany could just make her out now.  "You crashed into a sheep in
/the air/?"

"Maybe it was a cow, or something.  What are those things that go
/snuffle snuffle/?"

"You ran into a flying hedgehog?"

"No, as it happened.  We were down low, looking for a bush for Mrs.
Happenstance."  There was a sigh in the gloom.  "It's because of her
trouble, poor soul.  We've stopped at a lot of bushes on the way here,
believe me!  And do you know what?  Inside every single one of them is
something that stings, bites, kicks, screams, howls, squelches, farts
enormously, goes all spiky, tries to knock you over, or does an enormous
pile of poo!  Haven't you people up here ever heard of porcelain?"

Tiffany was taken aback.  "Well, yes, but not in the fields!"

"They would be all the better for it," said Mrs. Proust.  "I've ruined
a decent pair of boots, I have."

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 442 (passage starts mid-paragraph; see /The Wee Free Men/;
#         'underrr' and 'ag-rreeeed' are accurate; 'arr-angement' is
#         hyphenated to span lines--it's just a guess that it would have
#         been hyphenated anyway)
%passage 13
"Nae king, nae quin, nae laird!  One baron--and underrr mutually
ag-rreeeed arr-angement, ye ken!"

  [I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Snuff (2)
%passage 1
They were crude weapons, to be sure, but a flint axe hitting your head does
not need a degree in physics.  

  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
It is a strange thing to find yourself doing something you 
have apparently always wanted to do, when in fact up until 
that moment you had never known that you always wanted to do it...

  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
#
#
#
%title Raising Steam (8)
%passage 1
Yesterday you never thought about it and after today you 
don't know what you would do without it. 

That was what the technology was doing. 
It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
If you take enough precautions, you never need to take precautions.

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 57 (Anchor Books edition)
%passage 3
Rhys Rhysson, Low King of the dwarfs, was a dwarf of keen intelligence,
but he sometimes wondered why someone with that intelligence would go into
dwarfish politics, let alone be King of the Dwarfs.  Lord Vetinari had it
so easy he must hardly know he was born!  The King thought that humans
were, well, reasonably sensible, whereas there was an old dwarf proverb
which, translated, said, "Any three dwarfs having a sensible conversation
will always end up having four points of view."

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 64
%passage 4
Curious, the Patrician thought, as Drumknott hurried away to dispatch a
clacks to the editor of the /Times/, that people in Ankh-Morpork professed
not to like change while at the same time fixating on every new
entertainment and diversion that came their way.  There was nothing the
mob liked better than novelty.  Lord Vetinari sighed again.  Did they
actually think?  These days /everybody/ used the clacks, even little old
ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about all
these newfangled ideas, totally missing the irony.  And in this doleful
mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were
just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when
fangled had reached its apogee.  Fangling was indeed, he thought, here
to stay.  Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a
fangler?

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 175 (third paragraph has a final sentence, but it's about 'grags'
#         which wouldn't make any sense here where's no context about them)
%passage 5
"Mister Lipwig, you know what they say about dwarfs?"

Moist looked blank.  "Very small people?"

"'Two dwarfs is an argument, three dwarfs is a war,' Mister Lipwig.  It's
squabble, squabble, squabble.  It's built into their culture.  [...]"

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 233 (second paragraph of a footnote)
%passage 6
There clearly has been magic at work in the Netherglades and its future as
the pharmacopoeia of the world is being tested by Professor Rincewind of
Unseen University.  A dispatch from him reveals that the juice pressed from
a certain little yellow flower induces certainty in the patient for up to
fifteen minutes.  About what they are certain they cannot specify, but the
patient is, in that short time, completely certain about /everything/.  And
further research has found that a floating water hyacinth yields in its
juices total /un/certainty about anything for half a hour.  Philosophers
are excited about the uses for these potions, and the search continues for
a plant that combines the qualities of both, thereby being of great use to
theologians.

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 288
%passage 7
The town of Big Cabbage, theoretically the last place any sensible person
would want to visit, was nevertheless popular throughout the summer because
of the attractions of Brassica World and the Cabbage Research Institute,
whose students were the first to get a cabbage to a height of five hundred
yards propelled entirely by its own juices.  Nobody asked why they felt it
was necessary to do this, but that was science for you, and, of course,
students.

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 363-364 ("Of the Wheel the Spoke" is the goblin's formal name; perhaps
#              a new name chosen or given after inventing the bicycle?)
%passage 8
A few weeks later, Drumknott persuaded Lord Vetinari to accompany him to
the area behind the palace where a jungle of drain pipes emptied and
several mismatched sheds, washhouses, and lean-tos housed some of the
necessary functions without which a modern palace could not operate.(1)

There was a young goblin waiting there, rather nervous, clasping what
looked like two wheels held together by not very much.  The wheels were
spinning.

Durmknott cleared his throat.  "Show his lordship your new invention,
Mister Of the Wheel the Spoke."

(1) Frankly most palaces are just like this.  Their backsides do not bear
looking at.

  [Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
%title The Shepherd's Crown (1)
%passage 1
'It's an inconvenience, true enough, and I don't like it at all, but I
know that you do it for everyone, Mister Death. Is there any other way?'

NO, THERE ISN'T, I'M AFRAID. WE ARE ALL FLOATING IN THE WINDS OF TIME. 
BUT YOUR CANDLE, MISTRESS WEATHERWAX, WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE 
IT GOES OUT -- A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED. FOR I CAN SEE THE 
BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND 
IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT. . . 

  [The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%e title
%e section
#-----------------------------------------------------
# Used for interaction with Death.
#
%section Death
%title Death Quotes (10)
%passage 1
WHERE THE FIRST PRIMAL CELL WAS, THERE WAS I ALSO. WHERE MAN IS, THERE AM I.  WHEN THE LAST LIFE CRAWLS UNDER FREEZING STARS, THERE WILL I BE.
%e passage
# Feet of Clay, p. 17 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES.  /I/ TURN UP ONLY ONCE.
%e passage
# Men at Arms, p. 27 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3
THINK OF IT MORE AS BEING ... DIMENSIONALLY DISADVANTAGED.
%e passage
# Soul Music, p. 146 (Harper Torch edition; we omit "said Death," after comma)
%passage 4
I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.
%e passage
%passage 5
# Not a direct quote, but a reference to Thief of Time and the fact that
# the player is War
HAVE YOU SPOKEN TO RONNIE LATELY?
%e passage
# Raising Steam, p. 180 (Anchor Books edition)
%passage 6
PLEASE DO NOT PANIC.  YOU ARE MERELY DEAD.
%e passage
# Small Gods, p. 90 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 7
THERE IS A LITTLE CONFUSION AT FIRST.  IT IS ONLY TO BE EXPECTED.
%e passage
# Hogfather, p. 343 (Harper Torch edition; Death "lives" outside of normal
#                    time and space)
%passage 8
THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR ANOTHER LAST MINUTE.
# Wintersmith, p. 187 (HarperTeen edition; dying Miss Treason takes a ham
# [too silly?]         sandwich with her to the grave, and it accompanies
#                      her to the afterlife, but its condiments don't)
%passage 9
MUSTARD IS ALWAYS TRICKY.
%passage 10
PICKLES OF ALL SORTS DON'T SEEM TO MAKE IT.  I'M SORRY.
%e title
%e section
