Hannah Kelly > Recent Status Updates

A coffin lid smacked down on Igor's head, making an oddly metallic sound. He reached up slowly to rub the spot, and then turned around. This time the lid smacked into his face.

"Oh... thit," he said, and folded up. Oats appeared, face aglow with adrenaline and righteousness.

"I smote him mightily!"

On the other hand, he thought, as he packed up and prepared to move on, books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the world

"Why did you come to visit Granny Weatherwax?"

"Well, everyone speaks very .. highly of her," said Oats, sud-denly picking his words like a man pulling plums from a boiling pot.

the kind of man who goes for long walks in the morning and spends the afternoons improving his mind in his own private library or doing small interesting experiments on parsnips and never, ever, worrying about money. There was something glossy about him, and also a sort of urgent, hungry enthusiasm, the kind you get when someone has just read a really interesting book and is determined to tell someone all about it

The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches, they gave you a bigger shovel.

And you got these bare walls, this bare floor, this cold cottage. The darkness in the corners grew out into the room and began to tangle in her hair.

They didn't ask her!

She'd never, ever asked for anything in return. And the trouble with not asking for anything in return was that sometimes you didn't get it.

He had an amazing smile. It appeared on his face as if someone had operated a shutter. One moment it wasn't there, the next moment it was. And then it was gone.

"Still... nice little place you've got here... archchancellor."

Ridcully pronounced the word very carefully in order to accentuate the lower case "a."

The ability to ask questions like "Where am I and who is the 'I' that is asking?" is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish.*

*Although of course it's not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations.

"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.



P46: Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot.

"Rincewind awoke with a scream, to get it over with.

Then he saw the man watching him."

"Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything."

"It will depend on whether she comes to you as an enemy or not. If not, you have to ask yourself what we owe to each other as living beings."

"Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding, any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated."

"He ought to stay here, and do the best he could.

But... history was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders."

"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, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I 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."

"It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who bushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of going out and doing horrible things..."

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

"You seem to feel, Vimes, that the law is some kind of big glow-coding light in the sky which is not subject to control. And you are wrong. The law is what we tell it to be. I'm not going to add 'Do you understand?' because I know you understand and I am not going to try to reason with you."

"To be frank... the city is to be placed under martial law."

"Yessir? What kind of law's that, sir?" said Vimes, staring Rstraight ahead.

"You know very well, Vimes."

"Is it the kind where you shout 'Stop!' before you fire, sir, or the other kind?"

"Some of my favorite Patrician characterizations so far:

"... If the Patrician was anything, he was the political equivalent of the old lady who saves bits of string because you never know when they might come in handy."

"After all, when you seek advice from someone it's certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself""

"With the calm expression of someone who was methodically doing his duty, Detritus picked up a man and used him to hit some other men."

At times like this the ancient traditions of the sea that unite all mariners should come to the fore and see them combine in the face of their common foe, the hungry and relentless ocean.

However, at this point Mr. Arif hit Mr. Jackson over the head with an oar.

"If wishes were horses, I'd have a whole herd of them, roan and buckskin, lovely wild horses, never bridled, never broken, galloping over the plains past red mesas and blue mountains. But cowards ride rocking horses made of wood with painted eyes, and back and forth they go, back and forth in one place on the playroom floor, back and forth, and all the plains and mesas and mountains are only in the rider's eyes."

"In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war."

"Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water."

There is no information about corporations.There is only disinformation.Even after they collapse, imploding into a cratered ruin stinking of burnt stockholder and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier formed by members of Congress and other government officials holding hands and wearing yellow tape marked Private Property,No Trespassing, Keep Out,No Hunting,Fishing,or Accounting - even then there is no truth in them.

"Just before thy began to shovel in the earth, the Queen had laid on Sissie's coffin the diamond brooch that had come down to her, mother to daughter, for seventeen generations from Erbinrasa of the North, a jewel that no hand had ever touched that was not of the blood of the Erbinnas. Now it lay in the grave of the Little Common Girl. "It was not as bright as her eyes," the Queen said."

"For them, dream is a communion of all the sentient creatures in the world. It puts the notion of self deeply into question. I can imagine that for them to fall asleep is to abandon the self entirely, to enter or reenter the limitless community of being, almost as death is for us."

"I hate complaining to strangers -- you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well"

"The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction."