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315ad80
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Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.
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library
literary-criticism
discworld
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Terry Pratchett |
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1426d82
|
No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywh..
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Terry Pratchett |
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22f65df
|
There's no greys, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.' 'It's a lot more complicated than that -' 'No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.
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Terry Pratchett |
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4027a96
|
Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, "The mountain is, and is not." They would think, "The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana."
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Terry Pratchett |
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cc78633
|
The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.
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Terry Pratchett |
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04963f0
|
Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.' Vetinari looked perplexed. 'You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?
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Terry Pratchett |
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3213da4
|
The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.
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Terry Pratchett |
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82c9b31
|
YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE
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patricians
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Terry Pratchett |
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6a46315
|
Everybody does it!" Quirke burst out. "It's !" "Everybody?" said Vimes. He looked around at the squad. "Anyone else here take bribes?" His glare ran from face to face, causing most of the squad to do an immediate impression of the Floorboard and Ceiling Inspectors Synchronized Observation Team."
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humourous
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Terry Pratchett |
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785fa5f
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That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
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Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett |
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94323d4
|
Occasionally he would very nearly swear.
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Terry Pratchett |
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5c3e8a5
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All things are defined by names. Change the name, and you change the thing.
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Terry Pratchett |
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c59a33f
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Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything...
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Terry Pratchett |
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ad65064
|
You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?
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Terry Pratchett |
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c67fb01
|
Fortune favours the brave, sir," said Carrot cheerfully. "Good. Good. Pleased to hear it, captain. What is her position vis a vis heavily armed, well prepared and excessively manned armies?" "Oh, no-one's ever heard of Fortune favouring them, sir." "According to General Tacticus, it's because they favour themselves," said Vimes. He opened the battered book. Bits of paper and string indicated his many bookmarks. "In fact, men, the general ha..
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war
invasion
luck
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Terry Pratchett |
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9f39c5f
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And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.
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Terry Pratchett |
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1b0acd3
|
There are eight levels of wizardry on the Disc; after sixteen years Rincewind has failed to achieve even level one. In fact it is considered opinion of some of his tutors that he is incapable even of achieving level zero, which most normal people are born at; to put it another way, it has been suggested that when Rincewind dies the average occult ability of the human race will actually go up by a fraction.
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humor
occult
wizards
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Terry Pratchett |
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65a6076
|
That's what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there's food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be.
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Terry Pratchett |
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982e615
|
Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words.
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words
library
gevaisa
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Terry Pratchett |
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6d51252
|
We may even find out why the duck-billed platypus.* *Not why is it . Just why it is.
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Terry Pratchett |
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0d11e77
|
I'm not bloody well going to have it, understand?" Vimes shouted, shaking the ape back and forth. "Oook," the Librarian pointed out, patiently. "What? Oh. Sorry." Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn't make an issue out of it because a man angry enough to lift 300 pounds of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind."
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Terry Pratchett |
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37591ee
|
Oh, good grief," said Vimes. "Look, it's quite simple, man. I was expected to go "At last, alcohol!", and chugalug the lot without thinking. Then some respectable pillars of the community" - he removed the cigar from his mouth and spat - "were going to find me, in your presence, too - which was a nice touch - with the evidence of my crime neatly hidden but not so well hidden that they couldn't find it." He shook his head sadly. "The trouble..
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humourous
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Terry Pratchett |
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745c106
|
Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out...
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Terry Pratchett |
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0d49e6c
|
Then Carrot said, "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, captain. That's what they say." "What?" Vimes' sudden rage was like a thunderclap. "Who says that? When has that ever been true? It's never been true! It's the kind of thing people without power say to make it all seem less bloody awful, but it's just words, it never makes any difference -"
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quotes
|
Terry Pratchett |
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695f305
|
The enemy wasn't men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin' stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.
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Terry Pratchett |
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9bd54ce
|
That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.
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Terry Pratchett |
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55afb38
|
Overexcited? No! I'm getting very calmly worried that someone might shoot me!
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Terry Pratchett |
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435d67a
|
Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? 'Yes. Yes, of course.' Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.
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people
life
small-gods
life-philosophy
discworld
|
Terry Pratchett |
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54db7ec
|
This ain't right, you know. She's the one who ought to rule, fair enough. And you used magic to help her this far, and that's all right. But it stops right here. It's up to her what happens next. You can't make things right by magic. You can only stop making them wrong." Mrs. Gogol pulled herself up to her full, impressive height. "Who's you to say what I can and can't do here?" "We're her godmothers," said Granny. "That's right," said Nann..
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Terry Pratchett |
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92e4956
|
Oh, that's just Thud! That's easy!" yapped a voice. Both men turned to look at Horsefry, who had been made perky by sheer relief. "I used to play it when I was a kid," he burbled. It's boring. The dwarfs always win!" Gilt and Vetinari shared a look. It said: While I loathe you and every aspect of your personal philosophy to a depth unplummable by any line, I'll credit you at least with not being Crispin Horsefry."
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hate
humorous
going-postal
enemy
loathing
vetinari
|
Terry Pratchett |
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2c1cb44
|
An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.
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Terry Pratchett |
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8f4dbe8
|
There was a bird whistle as Polly neared the hiding place. She identified this one as the sound of the Very Bad Bird Impersonator...
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humor
|
Terry Pratchett |
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751dc37
|
It was said that [Vetinari] would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city*... [Footnote] And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.
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Terry Pratchett |
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32bcf5e
|
one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinknes..
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Terry Pratchett |
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8c25b2e
|
Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn't want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.
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Terry Pratchett |
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5b1fe19
|
When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions.
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Terry Pratchett |
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6937b84
|
Mr Lipwig, there's a lady in the hall to see you and we've thanked her for not smoking three times and she's still doing it!
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Terry Pratchett |
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ee6dc6b
|
What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?
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|
Terry Pratchett |
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987956c
|
People ought to think for themselves... The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to. (Corporal Carrot)
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Terry Pratchett |
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7dcbb55
|
Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.
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Terry Pratchett |
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d75fa5d
|
The invisible people knew that happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.
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mankind
|
Terry Pratchett |
|
69e359e
|
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, an..
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Terry Pratchett |
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5ac59df
|
Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn't divide easily into 'true' and 'false', but instead could be 'things that people needed to know at the moment' and 'things that they didn't need to know at the moment'.
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truth
pratchett
tiffany-aching
|
Terry Pratchett |
|
5197623
|
The Empire's got something worse than whips all right. It's got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.
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terry-pratchett
|
Terry Pratchett |