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marsreds · 7 years

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a not-at-all short introduction to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (with quotes and without spoilers)

Sooooo this is a thing. That has happened.

Before we begin, a few notes:

This thing is loooong. Like super long. Like 29.2k words long.

It is an actual spoiler free introduction, meant for people who know nothing or very little about the series.

It is split into three parts: 1) Me summarising and quoting individual books (except the last three, on account of not having read them yet) 2) Me talking about how and where to start for maximum reader satisfaction (based on my personal preferences) and 3) Miscellaneous (Adaptations, Fandom, etc.)

The quotes are there to give you a feeling of the writing, and were chosen either because they’re spoiler-free or require context to count as spoilers. (This means that some of the most memorable were left out.)

The quotes that are from the specific book that I am talking about at the moment are both blockquoted and in italics. Other quotes are merely in italics.

If/when I have something I wanna say during a quote I’ll put it in {}

Alright. First the bare bones:

Discworld’s a series of 41 books written by English author Terry Pratchett. They take place on the titular Discworld which is a flat world that sits on the backs of four elephants that stand on a turtle, Great A’Tuin.

While technically most of these books are self-contained, the whole of the series is usually divided into sub-series that follow a recurring set of main characters and share themes.

The sub series are:

Rincewind (and the wizards),

The Witches,

Death (and family),

The City Watch,

The Moist Von Lipwig series,

The Tiffany Aching series,

Stand-alones

Continued under the cut.

The books

-The first book, The Colour of Magic, was written in 1983 as a straight up parody of The Standard Fantasy Novel. It introduces us to Rincewind the “Wizzard“ (bc he can’t spell. God I’m still angry abt this) and sets the formula for his books. Which is, more or less: Rincewind does NOT want to be a hero. Fate and the Universe do not care. Rincewind tries to run away. Just runs into waaaay more trouble. Somehow, by accident, manages to save the day anyway. I don’t... actually care about Rincewind? I find his books repetitive, so the best I can do is point you towards @bookhobbit in general, and this post in particular.

This book also introduces Twoflower, the Disc’s very first tourist, his man-eating, walking Luggage, Death (although he doesn’t actually come into his own until later) who TALKS LIKE THIS, and the city of Ankh-Morpork, while it’s burning to the ground.

There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favoured 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.

By now the whole of downtown Morpork was alight, and the richer and worthier citizens of Ankh on the far bank were bravely responding to the situation by feverishly demolishing the bridges.

… if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet armour and shouting “All gods are bastards”.

Rincewind opened his mouth to reply but felt the words huddle together in his throat, reluctant to emerge into a world that was rapidly going mad.

‘I assure you the thought never crossed my mind, lord.’ ‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander’.

… what he didn’t like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

The Watch were always careful not to intervene too soon in any brawl where the odds were not stacked heavily in their favour. The job carried a pension, and attracted a cautious, thoughtful kind of man.

-Then Pratchett realised that that one didn’t really have any plot, so he wrote a sequel—the only actual direct sequel in the series—The Light Fantastic. I don’t actually remember much of this one: we’re still with Rincewind and Twoflower, we meet Cohen the Barbarian and with him the “Survival is a matter of practice” school of thought, and things from the Dungeon Dimensions try to get out.

Introduces Death’s (adopted) daughter and we learn that Death’s horse is named Binky.

When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency. It slows right down. And on the Discworld the magic was embarrassingly strong, which meant that the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup.

…fake fossil bones put there by a Creator with nothing better to do than upset archaeologists and give them silly ideas.

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

It is said that the opposite of noise is silence. This isn’t true. Silence is only the absence of noise.

It is well known that things from undesirable universes are always seeking an entrance into this one…

The Disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailors who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.

The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see. You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

- Equal Rites is the first book in the Witches series, but also considered apart from it since the only witch they share is Granny Weatherwax (who isn’t yet herself here).

The story follows Esk, a little girl who, due to a mix-up, ended up with a wizard staff. in a world where magic is strictly gender-segregated.

However, it is primarily a story about the world. Here it comes now. Watch closely, the special effects are expensive.

…no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.

…magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.

‘They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.’

…Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.

A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.

The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Milk,’ said the child, still focusing furiously. ‘You get it out of goats. You know?’ Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats.

‘If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?’ ‘Can’t girls seek their fortune?’ ‘I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune.’

Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer’. They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.

…she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.

‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny. ‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’ ‘That’s true.’ ‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’ ‘The sunsets were redder.’ ‘There were more old people. The world was full of them,’ said the wizard. ‘Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.’

Also relevant to the above is this essay titled: Why Gandalf Never Married.

Equal Rites also gives us the first instance where Pratchett shows that he Understands the value of “women’s work” [Granny and Esk hit the road to get Esk to Unseen University, to get proper wizard training, on the way they meet another witch]:

The council have tried to run me out once or twice, you know, but they all have wives and somehow it never quite happens. They say I’m not the right sort, but I say there’d be many a family in town a good deal bigger and poorer if it wasn’t for Madame Goatfounder’s Pennyroyal Preventives. I know who comes in my shop, I do. I remember who buys buckeroo drops and ShoNuff Ointment, I do. Life isn’t bad. And how is it up at your village with the funny name?

- Mort is the first novel in the Death sub-series.

Death gets an apprentice, then goes on holiday. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Also solidifies Death’s job and character.

‘But you’re Death,’ said Mort. ‘You go around killing people!’ I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT’D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN’T IT?

Something like a small blue supernova flared for a moment in the depths of his eyesockets. It dawned on Mort that, with some embarrassment and complete lack of expertise, Death was trying to wink.

WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN? 'How many drinks have you had?' FORTY-SEVEN. 'Just about anything, then,' said the barman and, because he knew his job and knew what was expected of him when people drank alone in the small hours, he started to polish a glass with the slops cloth and said, 'Your lady thrown you out, has she?' PARDON? 'Drowning your sorrows, are you?' I HAVE NO SORROWS. 'No, of course not. Forget I mentioned it.' He gave the glass a few more wipes. 'Just thought it helps to have someone to talk to,' he said. The stranger was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said: YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME? 'Yes. Sure. I'm a good listener.' NO-ONE EVER WANTED TO TALK TO ME BEFORE. 'That's a shame.' THEY NEVER INVITE ME TO PARTIES, YOU KNOW. 'Tch.' THEY ALL HATE ME. EVERYONE HATES ME. I DON’T HAVE A SINGLE FRIEND. 'Everyone ought to have a friend,' said the barman sagely. I THINK — 'Yes?' I THINK . . . I THINK I COULD BE FRIENDS WITH THE GREEN BOTTLE.

'And what was your previous position?' I BEG YOUR PARDON? 'What did you do for a living?' said the thin young man behind the desk. The figure opposite him shifted uneasily. I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD. 'Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?' Death thought about it. I SUPPOSE A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF EXPERTISE WITH AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS? he ventured after a while. The young man shook his head firmly. NO?

WHAT IS IT CALLED WHEN YOU FEEL WARM AND CONTENT AND WISH THINGS WOULD STAY THAT WAY? 'I guess you'd call it happiness,' said Harga. Inside the tiny, cramped kitchen, strata'd with the grease of decades, Death spun and whirled, chopping, slicing and flying. His skillet flashed through the fetid steam. He'd opened the door to the cold night air, and a dozen neighbourhood cats had strolled in, attracted by the bowls of milk and meat – some of Harga's best, if he'd known – that had been strategically placed around the floor. Occasionally Death would pause in his work and scratch one of them behind the ears. 'Happiness,' he said, and puzzled at the sound of his own voice.

{and then you cry for years and years about a seven-foot-tall skeleton}

- Sourcery. Rincewind’s back. So are the Dungeon Dimensions. And all he’s got is a half-brick in a sock.

Deals with themes of identity and self-determination and can a wizard be a wizard if he can’t spell? (if u think i’ll ever let that one go, u are Wrong)

NOTHING IS FINAL. NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE. EXCEPT ME, OF COURSE.

‘I meant,’ said Iplsore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?’ Death thought about it. ‘CATS,’ he said eventually, ‘CATS ARE NICE.’

YOU’RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said. ‘That’s what being alive is all about.’

When it comes to glittering objects, wizards have all the taste and self-control of a deranged magpie. …senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners.

…to say that wizards are healthily competitive by nature is like saying that piranhas are naturally a little peckish.

It takes more than a bit of magic and someone being blown to smoke in front of him to put a wizard off his food.

…‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’

This was the type of thief that could steal the initiative, the moment and the words right out of your mouth.

‘Sorry. I don’t know why, but the prospect of certain death in unknown lands at the claws of exotic monsters isn’t for me. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t get the hang of it. Each to their own, that’s what I say, and I was cut out for boredom.’

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

- Wyrd Sisters. The second Witches book.

The king is murdered. His son is sent away with a theatre troupe. Also Shakespeare. So much Shakespeare like you cannot believe.

Really introduces Granny Weatherwax, as well as the rest of her coven: Nanny Ogg, Granny’s best friend since childhood, matriarch of the Ogg clan, has been married three times, last husband died thirty years ago. Youngest child is in his late teens. No-one dares question this. And Magrat Garlick, a new-age hippie, wishy-washy sort of witch.

Sets up the central theme of the Witches series which is the Power of Stories. And how everyone has a role, but that doesn’t mean you have to fulfill it and it does so by example because if there ever was a typical Evil Witch it’s Granny Weatherwax—except that she refuses. She refuses to be anything less than Good, and she doesn’t want to but there’s no one else around to do it so she must and if there’s one thing Esme Weatherwax knows about being a witch is that being a witch means Getting Shit Done (but this doesn’t mean that she’s gonna be nice about it).

(“What’s empowerin’ about witchcraft anyway?” said Granny. “It’s a daft sort of a word.” “Search me,” said Nanny. “I did start out in witchcraft to get boys, to tell you the truth.” “Think I don’t know that?” “What did you start out to get, Esme?” Granny stopped, and looked up at the frosty sky and then down at the ground. “Dunno,” she said, at last. “Even, I suppose.” And that, Nanny thought, was that. -From “The Sea and Little Fishes” , a Discworld short story)

The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which the gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of the elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well I can do next Tuesday.’

Unlike wizards, who like nothing better than a complicated hierarchy, witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression. It’s up to each individual witch to take on a girl to hand the area over to when she dies. Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.

‘I hate cats.’ Death’s face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant. I SEE, he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat-haters.

‘Something comes,’ she said. ‘Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?’ said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books. ‘The pricking of my ears,’ said Granny.

She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.

Granny Weatherwax didn’t hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her. She didn’t like the expression at all.

It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax’s life that, despite all her efforts, she’d arrived at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome if slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy. A wizard she’d consulted had explained it was on account of her having a metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,’ said Granny.

Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realise it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. Some people are even more unfortunate.They get them all.

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

It’s not much using being a witch unless you look like one.

‘Actors,’ said Granny, witheringly. ‘As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.’

Granny subsided into unaccustomed, trouble silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her to control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

‘I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because - well, June 12th was quite nice...’

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger is one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard steam of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

Magrat knew she had lost. You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how.

- Pyramids. Stand-alone.

Heir to the throne of an ancient Egypt rip-off gets a modern education. Inherits throne. Tries to figure out why is there an ancient Egypt type place when everywhere else is late medieval/renaissance. Turns out there’s a reason. It involves gods.

"Therefore I will have dinner sent in," said the priest. "It will be roast chicken." "I hate chicken." Dios smiled. "No sire. On Wednesdays the King always enjoys chicken, sire."

- Guards! Guards! The first City Watch book. According to Pratchett, the first time he wrote the jokes to fit the story and not the other way around.

Young Carrot, having been raised by dwarves, goes to the Big City to join the Watch and learn to be a Man. The city is Ankh-Morpork. It actually does not go as you would expect. At the same time Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night are trying to overthrow the Patrician. By summoning dragons. That one does go as you’d expect. And Sam Vimes really, really, really wants a drink.

Introduces us to:

The (initial) members of the decaying and downtrodden Ankh-Morpork City Watch:

Captain Sam Vimes (the main-est character of the Watch books) an angry (so, so, so angry), cynical, noir detective-type man who has spent the better part of the last thirty years looking at the world through the bottom of a bottle. And yet, still strives to be Good. Strives and struggles and pretty much drags himself kicking and screaming into the light—

(”Who watches the Watchman?” “I do, always.”)

Gets one of the most satisfying character development arcs over the series, like words cannot describe how satisfying it is to watch Sam Vimes grow.

Carrot Ironfoundersson, raised by dwarves. Genuinely believes that everyone is actually really the decent sort, and, really, we should all get along. Has an extremely ordinary sword.

Sargent Fred Colon and Corporal Nobby Nobbs. Those two guys. You know the ones. The first one is the quintessential man from the street and the second needs official papers that prove he’s actually human.

Guards! Guards! also properly introduces Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, the man responsible for making Ankh-Morpork what it is.

And, of course: Lady Sybil Rampkin, richest woman in Ankh-Morpork, tall, bald, in her forties, breeds swamp dragons.

Also, since I forgot him before: The Librarian of Unseen University, real name unknown and unimportant, who due to a series of magical mishaps ended up as an orangutan, then promptly decided that it is far easier to enforce the rules of the library when you are a hundred kilos of muscle, and refused all attempts to turn him back. Also L-space. Just L-space.

“Oh, the caged whale. You want the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. Three doors down.” “Who're you, then?” “We're the Illuminated and Ancient Brethren of Ee.” "I thought you met over in Treacle Street,'' said the damp man, after a while. “Yeah, well. You know how it is. The fretwork club have the room Tuesdays. There was a bit of a mix-up.” “Oh? Well, thanks anyway.” “My pleasure.” The little door slammed shut.

Now pull back briefly from the dripping streets of Ankh-Morpork, pan across the morning mists of the Disc, and focus in again on a young man heading for the city with all the openness, sincerity and innocence of purpose of an iceberg drifting into a major shipping lane.

People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."

All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

{this is a joke here, but keep it in mind, it’ll come back}

Fabricati diem, Pvnc.

-The motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch

One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, at least it should be organized crime. And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life. And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes … I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn’t time fly, I know where they play. So you won’t forget about what we agreed, will you? And he smiled.

‘I shall deal with the matter momentarily,’ [the Patrician] said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask.

The thief shuffled out. It was always like this with the Patrician, he reflected bitterly. You came to him with a perfectly reasonable complaint. Next thing you knew, you were shuffling backwards, bowing and scraping, relieved simply to be getting away. You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away.

One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.

He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting any more. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.

{Oh, Vimes}

Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sergeant Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. He got her tea ready before he left at night, she left his breakfast nice and hot in the oven in the mornings. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.

The only reason you couldn’t say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away.

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there a few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people. The fresh rain glistened on the panorama of towers and rooftops, all unaware of the teeming, rancorous world it was dropping into. Luckier rain fell on upland sheep, or whispered gently over forests, or pattered somewhat incestuously into the sea. Rain that fell on Ankh-Morpork, though, was rain that was in trouble. They did terrible things to water, in Ankh-Morpork. Being drunk was only the start of its problems.

... laws governing the animal kingdom did not apply to the Librarian. On the other hand, the Librarian himself was never very interested in obeying the laws governing the human kingdom, either. He was one of those little anomalies you have to build around.

Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armour-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion.

He couldn’t help remembering how much he’d wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they’d been starving – anything with meat on it would have done.

{Oh, Vimes}

‘A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch,’ Carrot drew himself up proudly, ‘because someone’s taken a book? You think that’s worse than murder?’

The Librarian gave him the kind of look other people would reserve for people who said things like ‘What’s so bad about genocide?’

The Guild of Firefighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like ‘Very inflammable looking place, this’ and ‘Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?’

It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the remainder were here to rob, importune or sell hot dogs to the rest.

... Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler, purveyor of absolutely anything that could be sold hurriedly from an open suitcase in a busy street and was guaranteed to have fallen off the back of an oxcart.

{Another reoccurring character, and that up there is all you need to know}

It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he’d decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.

...when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.

For a moment the rank felt as though they had just returned from single-handedly conquering a distant province. They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt.

Say what you like about the people of Ankh-Morpork, they had always been staunchly independent, yielding to no man their right to rob, defraud, embezzle and murder on an equal basis. This seemed absolute right, to Vimes’s way of thinking. There was no difference at all between the richest man and the poorest beggar, apart from the fact that the former had lots of money, food, power, fine clothes, and good health. But at least he wasn’t any better.

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

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

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

{Oh, Vimes}

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

Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn’t make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300 lbs of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.

‘I believe you find life such a problem because you think that there are the good people and the bad people,’ said the man. ‘You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.’

A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you need the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that.

That was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.

And eventually, under siege, you did what Ankh-Morpork had always done – unbar the gates, let the conquerors in, and make them your own.

- Faust Eric Rincewind again.

Was first an illustrated novel, then became a novel-novel. Rincewind gets mistaken for a wish-granting demon. Hijinks ensue.

- Moving Pictures Stand-alone, sort of.

Hollywood has come to the Disc! More film references than you could shake a stick at! Star power! Eldritch horrors! Talking dogs!

The first book to have the senior staff of Unseen University as more than bit parts. Introduces Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor, hired because they thought that an outdoorsy type would be easy to get rid of. Turns out he’s Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities. At least there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

…Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was ‘Winged you, yer bastard!’

There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was not run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men.

‘Students?’ barked the Archchancellor. ‘Yes, Master. You know? They’re the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we’re a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats-’

… Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world. Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor has passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour.

Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got.

… Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.

‘Make him a star? What’d he want a star for?’ ‘I didn’t know you could make stars… I thought they were like, you know, stuck to the sky…’ ‘I think he meant make him a star. You know, him himself. Turn him into a star.’ ‘How can you make anyone into a star?’ ‘I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?’

‘What’re you supposed to be?’ he said at last. ‘A leader of a pack of desert bandits, apparently,’ said Victor. ‘Romantic and dashing.’ ‘Dashing where?’ ‘Just dashing generally, I guess.’

Camels are far too intelligent to admit to being intelligent.

All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing. Their courtships are largely concerned with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is.

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants. At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff.

‘Fate doesn’t like it when people take up more space than they ought to.’

Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business. The trick was to do magic and get away with it.

According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles.

The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.

…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

If heroes didn’t arrive in the nick of time, where was the sense in anything?

- Reaper Man. Second Death book.

Death gets fired. People stop dying. One of them is a Senior Wizard or UU. It’s a mess.

Introduces the Auditors of Reality.

Y’all know the Death and the Maiden troupe? Where Death goes and falls in love with a young woman, except it’s not a woman but a metaphor for Life? Well it’s like that, except there is no young woman, there is no metaphor, there’s just Life and Living and you continue to cry about a seven-foot-tall skeleton. Forever.

"Windle!” he said. “We thought you were dead!” He had to admit that it wasn’t a very good line. You didn’t put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they’ve got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour.

It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000), qualify under the term ‘running’ or, for that matter, ‘water.’

The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades was remarkably like the aforesaid well-known astronomical phenomenon: it had a certain strong attraction, no light escaped from it, and it could indeed become a gateway to another world. The next one.

“I haven’t felt like this since Mrs. Cake was one of my flock.” “Mrs. Cake? What’s a Mrs. Cake?” “You have . . . ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?” “Yes.” “We have someone called Mrs. Cake.”

He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself. It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.

Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small.

{Ah, puns}

Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can.

‘Yeah, it’s always the same,’ said Reg Shoe bitterly. ‘Once you’re dead, people just don’t want to know, right? They act as if you’ve got some horrible disease. Dying can happen to anyone, right?’

Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason.

‘It can’t be intelligent, can it?’ said the Bursar. ‘All it’s doing is moving around slowly and eating things,’ said the Dean. ‘Put a pointy hat on it and it’d be a faculty member,’ said the Archchancellor.

I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND.

‘Oook.’ ‘You? We can’t take you,’ said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. ‘You don’t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.’ ‘Oook!’ said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean.

There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts.

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.

I HAVE RECEIVED THE BADLY-WRITTEN NOTE OF THE BANSHEE.

DROP THE SCYTHE, AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.

- Witches Abroad. Witches series.

Magrat inherits a fairy godmother wand. Sets off to Discworld New Orleans to do the job. Nanny and Granny come along. On the way there pass through about 15678635 different fairy tales. Granny can’t be having with that.

Again about the power of Stories. Has one of the most heartbreaking deconstructions of the talking animal trope I’ve ever read.

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.

... it used to be so simple, once upon a time. Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition. Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like ‘Hurrah, I’ve discovered Boyle’s Third Law.’ And everyone knew where they stood. But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself – partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.

The waterfall was the second highest anywhere on the Disc and had been discovered in the Year of the Revolving Crab by the noted explorer Guy de Yoyo (Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren’t explorers and didn’t count.)

Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.

Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.

People like Nanny Ogg turn up everywhere It’s as if there’s some special morphic generator dedicated to the production of old women who like a laugh and aren’t averse to the odd pint, especially of some drink normally sold in very small glasses. You find them all over the place, often in pairs.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

Forever didn’t seem to last as long these days as once it did.

Fairy godmothers develop a very deep understanding about human nature, which makes the good ones kind and the bad ones powerful.

‘Nothing wrong with being self-assertive,’ said Nanny. ‘Self-asserting’s what witching’s all about.’ ‘I never said there was anything wrong with it,’ said Granny. ‘I told her there was nothing wrong with it. You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you’re told.’

‘Look,’ said Magrat desperately, ‘why don’t I go by myself?’ ‘‘Cos you ain’t experienced at fairy godmothering,’ said Granny Weatherwax. This was too much even for Magrat’s generous soul. ‘Well, nor are you,’ she said. ‘That’s true,’ Granny conceded. ‘But the point is…the point is…the point is we’ve not been experienced for a lot longer than you.’

It was one of the weak spots of Granny Weatherwax’s otherwise well-developed character that she’d never bothered to get the hang of steering things. It was alien to her nature. She took the view that it was her job to move and the rest of the world to arrange itself so that she arrived at her destination.

Greebo turned upon Granny Weatherwax a yellow-eyed stare of self-satisfied malevolence, such as cats always reserve for people who don’t like them, and purred. Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.

Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government.

Infinity contains more than you think. Everything, for a start.

… people are riddled with Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up into knots. Early morning is the worst time – there’s that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from fast asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.

‘You’d have to go a long day’s journey to find someone basically nastier than Esme,’ said Nanny Ogg, ‘and this is me sayin’ it. She knows exactly what she is. She was born to be good and she don’t like it.’

‘You can’t make happiness ...’ Granny Weatherwax stared at the distant city. ‘All you can do,’ she said, ‘is make an ending.

Cats are like witches. They don’t fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There’s no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won’t know they’ve lost, and to be real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There’s no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.

- Small Gods. Stand-alone.

In the empire of Omnia worship of the Great God ("holy horns") Om - dominates all aspects of life. Novice Brutha just wanted to tend to the melons. Instead, he finds a tortoise claiming to be The Great God himself. Exploration of Religion, Belief and the difference between the two ensues. Also philosophy and math jokes.

If you have decided that you’re just gonna read one Discworld book ever, my advice is for it to be this one.

The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

One of the recurring philosophical questions is: ‘Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?’ Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in the forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history … ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just … well, things happening one after another.

Many stories start long before they begin …

…there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do.

The people who really run organisations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose everyday and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect that would happen anyway if you were prepared to wait a few million years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine by means of grapes and time and enzymes wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time.

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.

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.

Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, ‘It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting’ …

Fear is a strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourishes underground.

You couldn’t put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place where the inevitable just went and waited.

When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror.

Words are the litmus paper of the minds. 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.

Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him.

‘Winners never talk about glorious victories. That’s because they’re the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. It’s only the losers who have glorious victories.'

‘What’s a philosopher?’ said Brutha. ‘Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,’ said a voice in his head.

‘That’s why it’s always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it’s all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There’s No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they’re going to start dribbling one of ‘em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy’s ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles…’

People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time.

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools - the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans - and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.’

‘Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,’ said Vorbis. ‘So I understand,’ said the Tyrant. ‘I imagine that fish have no word for water.’

The Captain frowned. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?’ ‘A bit of a poser, that,’ agreed the mate. ‘I s’pose it makes up for ‘em ... enjoying themselves all the time when they’re alive, too?’ He looked puzzled. Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious.

‘Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.’

‘Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place…’

And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god).

Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be.

Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.

‘No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.’

‘You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.’

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.

‘I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.’

‘Everything happens because things have happened before. Stupid.’

- Lords and Ladies. Witches series. Plus a side appearance by the Wizards.

Directly follows Witches Abroad, (but not a sequel, everything you need to know from there is explained in a 3-4 paragraph foreword). The Fair Folk are here and well...

Also our first glimpse of the “modern“ witches.

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired* – but that’s not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years. The point is, there is always something before. It’s always a case of Now Read On.

*Probably at the first pawn.

Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before. The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails and testicles of their father.* There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people.

*Gods like a joke as much as anyone else.

But what we have here is not a nice girl, as generally understood. For one thing, she’s not beautiful. There’s a certain set to the jaw and arch to the nose that might, with a following wind and in the right light, be called handsome by a good-natured liar. Also, there’s a certain glint in her eye generally possessed by those people who have found that they are more intelligent than most people around them but who haven’t yet learned that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out. Along with the nose, this gives her a piercing expression which is extremely disconcerting. It’s not a face you can talk to. Open your mouth and you’re suddenly the focus of a penetrating stare which declares: what you’re about to say had better be interesting.

{Do you ever read something and you cringe at how relatable it is?}

He had in fact been raised to be a Fool, a man whose job it was to caper and tell jokes and have custard poured down his trousers. This had naturally given him a grave and solemn approach to life and a grim determination never to laugh at anything ever again, especially in the presence of custard.

...[he] would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it’d save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.

There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now realize you’re going to have to look at lot of people in the eye today and you’re sober now and so are they but you can both remember.

The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn’t bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books.

‘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?’ ‘It’d take too long.’

Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.

… 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 of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.

‘I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,’ said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’ ‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.’

Knowing the time of your death is one of those strange bonuses that comes with being a true magic user. And, on the whole, it is a bonus. Many a wizard has passed away happily drinking the last of his wine cellar and incidentally owing very large sums of money.

The land between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops was fertile, well-cultivated, and dull, dull, dull. Travel broadens the mind. This landscape broadened the mind because the mind just flowed out from the ears like porridge.

It wasn’t that Ridcully was stupid. Truly stupid wizards have the life expectancy of a glass hammer. He had quite a powerful intellect, but it was powerful like a locomotive, and ran on rails and was therefore almost impossible to steer.

The universe doesn’t much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make an effort to catch them. Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’, ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.

{^^^^^!!!!!}

Strictly speaking, Hodgesaargh wasn’t his real name. On the other hand, on the basis that someone’s real name is the name they introduce themselves to you by, he was definitely Hodgesaargh. This was because the hawks and falcons in the castle mews were all Lancre birds and therefore naturally possessed of a certain ‘sod you’ independence of mind. After much patient breeding and training Hodgesaargh had managed to get them to let go of someone’s wrist, and now he was working on stopping them viciously attacking the person who had just been holding them i.e., invariably Hodgesaargh.

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

* Lit: ‘Thing-ies’.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

‘Glamour. Elves are beautiful. They’ve got,’ she spat the word, ‘style. Beauty. Grace. That’s what matters. If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty cruel little bastards they are.’

'Being alone isn't the same as not having other people around,' said Granny.

‘But they’re witches. I don’t like to ask them questions.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘They might give me answers. And then what would I do?’

‘You can’t cross the same river twice, Archchancellor,’ he said. Ridcully stared at him. ‘Why not? This is a bridge.’

‘Witches! Let me tell you about the witches round here-’ ‘Our mum’s a witch,’ said Shawn conversationally, rummaging in the sack. ‘As fine a body of women as you could hope to meet,’ said Ridcully, with barely a hint of mental gear-clashing. ‘And not a bunch of interfering power-mad old crones at all, whatever anyone might say.’

‘Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.’

…Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley.

She’d have to stop thinking like this. She seemed to have spent her whole life trying to make herself small, trying to be polite, apologizing when people walked over her, trying to be good-mannered. And what had happened? People had treated her as if she was small and polite and good-mannered.

Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

People remember badly. But societies remember well, the swarm remembers, encoding the information to slip it past the censors of the mind, passing it in from grandmother to grandchild in little bits of nonsense they won't bother to forget. Sometimes the truth keeps itself alive in devious ways despite the best efforts of the official keepers of information.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

'Being noticed is what a witch is all about.'

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.

‘I love the way humans think. They think like songs.’

‘…I had to learn. All my life. The hard way. And the hard way’s pretty hard, but not so hard as the easy way.’

{Favourite favourite favourite}

All she could do for all of them was be herself, here and now, as hard as she could.

‘The price for being the best is always…having to be the best.’

‘Act your age, Gytha.’ ‘Act? Don’t have to act, can do it automatic,’ said Nanny. ‘Acting half my age…now that’s the difficult trick.’

- Men at Arms. Watch series.

Someone wants to assassinate kill the Patrician (in this case Edward d’Eath) and resurrect the Monarchy and the Good Old DaysTM and the Watch has to stop them. a.k.a. “Sam Vimes And Put That King Back Where You Found Him Or So Help Me” Part I.

Begins and ends as a murder mystery.

Introduces Angua, Cuddy the dwarf, expands the character of Detritus the troll, and deals a bit with Troll-Dwarf relations, which will be expanded further along.

He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.

It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself.

‘What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?

From the back, Vetinari looked like a carnivorous flamingo.

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

Young Edward thinks that there is no lake of blood too big to wade through to put a rightful king on a throne, no deed too base in defence of a crown. A romantic, in fact.

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, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.

{coincidentally, Men at Arms is the point where Pratchett runs out of fucks to give}

‘Dwarfs and trolls get along like a house on fires’, said Nobby. ‘Ever been in a burning house, miss?’

Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

‘Hah! Your uniform doesn’t scare me,’ he said. Vimes looked down at his battered breastplate and worn mail. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is not a scary uniform. I’m sorry. Forward, Corporal Carrot and Lance-Constable Detritus.’ The Assassin was suddenly aware of the sunlight being blocked out. ‘Now these, I think you’ll agree,’ said Vimes, from somewhere behind the eclipse, ‘are scary uniforms.’

…all dogs don’t talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored.

{this book was published in 1993}

The most dangerous man in the world should be introduced. He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead, and had marvelled at how well they’d been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labour. For several years he hadn’t moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There’s a certain type of person it’s very hard to imprison.

That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know.

… when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme.

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

The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery...

{Probably my favourite pun}

He’d faced trolls and dwarf and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich.

The River Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse.

No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you. Someone had to be the butt of the world.

So many crimes are solved by a happy accident—by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi…

The Axiom 'Honest men have nothing to fear from the police' is currently under review by the Axioms Review Board.

{as i said, no fucks were given}

... 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.

Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go.

The Alchemist's Guild is opposite the Gambler's Guild. Usually. Sometimes it's above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.

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

You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school.

When you were a Watchman, you were a Watchman all the time, which was a bit of a bargain for the city since it only paid you to be a Watchman for ten hours of every day.

‘People ought to think for themselves, Captain Vimes says. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to.’

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

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

- Soul Music. Death series.

Rock’n’Roll is an eldritch abomination. It’s come to Discworld. At the same time Death has gone missing because [spoilers] and The Duty falls to Death’s granddaughter, his first naturally born heir.

Introduces aforementioned granddaughter, Susan, as well as Hex, the thinking engine.

Mostly music references but also, you know, the continuing saga of crying-about-a-7-foot-tall-skeleton.

But, if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed, it’s even more true that it changes the observer.

... she was brilliant in the same way that a diamond is brilliant, all edges and chilliness.

{about Susan}

It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever 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.

And, if they're said with the right passion and the gods are feeling bored, sometimes the universe will reform itself around words like that. Words have always had the power to change the world.

He liked black. It went with anything. It went with everything, sooner or later.

Miss Eulalie Butts and her colleague, Miss Delcross, had founded the college on the astonishing idea that, since gels had nothing much to do until someone married them, they might as well occupy themselves with learning things.

The question seldom addressed is where Medusa has snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting off the top of the deodorant bottle.

Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.

She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept trying to interfere with it.

'But alcohol debilitated the body and is a poison to the soul.' SOUNDS GOOD TO ME.

'What do you do with them?' he said. 'I bang them together.' 'And then what?' 'What do you mean, "And then what?"' 'What do you do after you've banged them together?' 'I bang them together again,' said Lias, one of nature's drummers.

You could say to the universe, this is not fair. And the universe would say: Oh, isn’t it? Sorry.

The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly. Had they bothered to learn to read and acquire some history books they'd have learned about the uncertain merits of things like scythes and pitchforks when used in battle against crossbows and broadswords.

‘Look,’ said Susan, ‘I’d just like you to know that I don’t believe any of this. I don’t believe there’s a Death of Rats in a cowl carrying a scythe.’ ‘He’s standing in front of you.’ ‘That’s no reason to believe it.’ ‘I can see you’ve certainly had a proper education.’

... the Hogfather is a winter myth figure who, on Hogswatchnight, gallops from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliver presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings, and ham to all children who have been good. He says ‘Ho ho ho’ a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details which tell you it’s a tale for the little folk). There’s a song about him. It begins: You’d Better Watch Out...

{guess what the next Death book is about}

The important thing, she decided, was to stay calm. There was always a logical explanation for everything, even if you had to make it up.

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.

The Quirm College for Young Ladies encouraged self-reliance and logical thought. Her parents had sent her there for that reason. They'd assumed that insulating her from the fluffy edges of the world was the safest thing to do. In the circumstances, this was like not telling people about self-defence so that no-one would ever attack them.

Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive the notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards the spiral can only wiggle downwards.

Parents were never young. They were merely waiting to become Parents.

'In my experience,' said Glod, 'what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.

‘Students?’ ‘Er. Yes?’ said Ponder, backing away. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, this is a university…’ Ridcully scratched his ear. The man was right of course. You had to have some of the buggers around, there was no getting away from it.

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

Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.

‘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.’

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

Death was used to travelling fast. In theory he was already everywhere, waiting for almost anything else. The fastest way to travel is to be there already.

- Interesting Times. Rincewind series.

Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde are attacking the Agatean Empire an Imperial China (Japan?) rip-off. Rincewind gets swept up.

Much closer in feel to the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic than the previous books and, no sugar-coating, kinda racist. Not the malicious sort, just the I-have-done-absolutely-no-research-but-I-am-still-writing-about-this sort of racist. So keep that in mind.

Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until it's too late that he's been using two queens all along.

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.

‘I didn’t know they were noble,’ said Io. ‘They’re all very rich and have had millions of people butchered or tortured to death merely for reasons of expediency and pride,’ said the Lady. The watching gods nodded solemnly. That was certainly noble behaviour. That was exactly what they would have done.

‘Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn’t add to the status of the University to have an ape on the faculty?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ridcully flatly. ‘You are. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.’

Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.

‘How will I get back?’ he said. ‘Same way you went. We’ll find you and bring you out. With surgical precision.’ Rincewind groaned. He knew what surgical precision meant in Ankh-Morpork. It meant ‘to within an inch or two, accompanied by a lot of screaming, and then they pour hot tar on you just where your leg was.’ There was something about Cohen. People caught optimism off him as though it was the common cold.

‘… I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.’ ‘After being a teacher all your life?’ ‘It did mean a change of perspective, yes.’ ‘But...well…surely…the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death…’ Mr Saveloy brightened up. ‘Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?’

‘Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.’

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.

'I always live in interestin' times,' said Cohen, in the satisfied voice of someone who did a lot to keep them interesting.

But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money – sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything – but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn’t sleep.

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

Freedom did, of course, include man's age-old right to starve to death.

Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: ‘Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.'

No, of course, Twoflower never wanted to cause any trouble. Some people never did. Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying ‘What happens if I do this?

The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

A wizard would sooner go without his robe and trousers than forgo his hat. Without his hat, people might think he was an ordinary person.

- Maskerade. Witches series.

Builds of of the previous books. Mostly a Phantom of the Opera spoof though.

Introduces Agnes and Perdita.

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

Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha! BEWARE!!!!! Yrs sincerely The Opera Ghost

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

"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."

Though there may be some superficial similarities between a psychiatrist and a headologist, there is a huge practical difference. A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don’t exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.

She could feel a future trying to land on her. 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.

Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong.

There was a crash from the direction of the kitchen, although it was really more of a crashendo—the long-drawn-out clatter that begins when a pile of plates begins to slip, continues when someone tries to grab at them, develops a desperate counter-theme when the person realizes they don’t have three hands, and ends with the roinroinroin of the one miraculously intact plate spinning around and around on the floor.

She could feel the auditorium in front of her, the huge empty space making the sound that velvet would make if it could snore. It wasn’t silence. A stage is never silent. It was the noise produced by a million other sounds that have never quite died away—the thunder of applause, the overtures, the arias. They poured down…fragments of tunes, lost chords, snatches of song.

A catastrophe curve, Mr Bucket, is what opera runs along. Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong, Mr Bucket. It works because of hatred and love and nerves. All the time. This isn’t cheese. This is opera. If you wanted a quiet retirement, Mr Bucket, you shouldn’t have bought the Opera House. You should have done something peaceful, like alligator dentistry.

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

It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end.

- Feet of Clay. Watch series.

Someone wants to assassinate dispose of the Patrician (in this case several someones) and resurrect the Monarchy and the Good Old DaysTM and the Watch has to stop them. a.k.a. “Sam Vimes And Put That King Back Where You Found Him Or So Help Me” Part II.

Begins as a murder mystery ends as an exploration of what makes a person.

Takes the joke about Lady dwarves and makes an actual wonderful compelling plot out of it!!

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. 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.

…summer isn’t a time. It’s a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

Dwarfs regard baking as part of the art of warfare. When they make rock cakes, no simile is intended.

I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE.

What changed history were the smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would go the trick.

‘Oh, well, if you prefer, I can recognize handwriting,’ said the imp proudly. ‘I’m quite advanced.’ Vimes pulled out his notebook and held it up. ‘Like this?’ he said. The imp squinted for a moment. ‘Yep,’ it said. ‘That’s handwriting, sure enough. Curly bits, spiky bits, all joined together. Yep. Handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.’

Anatomy was an important study at the Alchemists’ Guilde, owing to the ancient theory that the human body represented a microcosm of the universe, although when you saw one opened up it was hard to imagine which part of the universe was small and purple and went blomp-blomp when you prodded it.

Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors or windows – sometimes it doesn’t even need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.

‘Do you want me to get a doctor?’ ‘Are you mad? We want him to live!’

Corporal Nobbs sidled in. It was another special trait of his that he could sidle forwards as well as sideways.

Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.

Vimes sighed. He was an honest man. He’d always felt that was one of the bigger defects in his personality.

When Nobby had gone Vimes reached behind the desk and picked up a faded copy of Twurp’s Peerage or, as he personally thought of it, the guide to the criminal classes. You wouldn’t find slum dwellers in these pages, but you would find their landlords. And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

...where Nobby went wrong was thinking small. He sidled into places and punched things that weren't worth much. If only he'd sidled into continents and stolen entire cities, slaughtering many of the inhabitants in the process, he'd have been a pillar of the community.

They were men who felt that The Time Had Come. Regimes can survive barbarian hordes, crazed terrorists and hooded secret societies, but they're in real trouble when prosperous and anonymous men sit around a big table and think thoughts like that.

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.

‘It’s like that in the Watch, too,’ said Angua. ‘You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There’s no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads. You’ll soon learn the language. Basically it’s how much beer you supped last night, how strong the curry was you had afterwards, and where you were sick. Just think egotesticle.’

…Cockbill Street was where people lived who were worse than poor, because they didn’t know how poor they were. If you asked them they would probably say something like ‘mustn’t grumble’ or ‘there’s far worse off than us’ or ‘we’ve always kept uz heads above water and we don’t owe nobody nowt.’ He could here his granny speaking. ‘No one’s too poor to buy soap.’ Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.

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?

People said that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but it wasn’t true. There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the incorrigibly lawless. All the laws and rules were for those people stupid enough to think like Cockbill Street people.

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

‘D*mn!’ said Carrot, a difficult linguistic feat

‘The common people?’ said Vimes. ‘They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit.’

Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good watchman...

- Hogfather. Death series.

The Auditors are back. They’ve hired an assassin to inhume Santa Claus the Hogfather.

It’s up to Death and his granddaughter to save Christmas Hogswatch. The Tooth Fairy is relevant to all of this.

(Probably my favourite summary of any Discworld book? Like, you could try to make this up, but it already exists.)

Explores the nature of Belief, Humanity, Faith and other Capital First Letter words.

Also, crying-about-a-7-foot-tall-skeleton Part-I-don’t-even-know.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those cuts who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razorblades from the candyfloss of life.

In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practised the ultimate democracy. You didn’t need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people.

Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken. Mister Teatime enjoyed himself too much. And other people, also.

Like many people with no actual morals, Lord Downey did have standards….

‘Real children don’t go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs.’

The previous governess had used various monsters and bogeymen as a form of discipline. There was always something waiting to eat or carry off bad boys and girls for crimes like stuttering or defiantly and aggravatingly persisting in writing with their left hand. There was always a Scissor Man waiting for a little girl who sucked her thumb, always a bogeyman in the cellar. Of such bricks is the innocence of childhood constructed.

Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder.

‘...and then Jack chopped down the beanstalk, adding murder and ecological vandalism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned, but he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you’re a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.’

‘Sit down, will you? Assassin’s are always late. ‘cos of style, right?’ ‘This one’s mental.’ ‘Eccentric.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘A bag of cash.’

‘Well, the night is young,’ said Albert, sitting back in the sacks. THE NIGHT IS OLD. THE NIGHT IS ALWAYS OLD. The pigs galloped on. Then, ‘No, it ain’t.’ I’M SORRY? ‘The night isn’t any older than the day, master. It stands to reason. There must have been a day before anyone knew what the night was.’ YES, BUT IT’S MORE DRAMATIC. ‘Oh. Right, then.'

‘You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!' IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE. 'She's a child!' shouted Crumley. IT'S EDUCATIONAL. 'What if she cuts herself?' THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.

Susan had never been able to see the attraction in cats. They were owned by the kind of people who liked puddings. There were actual people in the world whose idea of heaven would be a chocolate cat.

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 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. 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.

‘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?

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

I THOUGHT IT WAS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY, said Death. ‘Ah, well, yes, you see, one of the things that makes folks even more jolly is knowing there’re people who ain’t,’ said Albert, in a matter-of-fact voice.

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost 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.

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.

‘Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.'

Humans Are Not Always Wrong

Ponder was a great believer in logic, in the face of all local evidence ...

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

IT IS ... UNFAIR. ‘That’s life, master.’ BUT I’M NOT. ‘I meant this is how it’s supposed to go, master,’ said Albert. NO. YOU MEAN THIS IS HOW IT GOES.

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

IT WASN’T STEALING. IT WAS JUST ... REDISTRIBUTION. IT WILL BE A GOOD DEED IN A NAUGHTY WORLD. ‘No, it won’t!’ THEN IT WILL BE A NAUGHTY DEED IN A NAUGHTY WORLD AND WILL PASS COMPLETELY UNNOTICED.

Somewhere almost out of hearing, children were at play. It was always a pleasant, lulling sound. Always provided, of course, you couldn’t hear the actual words.

‘He’s had a near-death experience!’ ‘We all have. It’s called “living”,’ said the Archchancellor shortly.

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.

THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR ANOTHER LAST MINUTE.

- Jingo. Watch series.

The sunken island of Leshp rises again. Ankh-Morpork and the Arabic-like Klatch both claim it, leading to diplomacy then riots, assassinations, and eventually war.

Deals with racism, xenophobia, nationalism and the point and purpose of the International Community.

Written with particular reference to the Falklands Conflict and the first Gulf War of 1990-1.

(Probably the most currently relevant of the books, which is kind of depressing)

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.

People live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work every day, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear.

Why are our people going out there,” said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves’ Guild. "Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and … additional wealth in a new land,” said Lord Vetinari. “What’s in it for the Klatchians?” said Lord Downey. “Oh, they’ve gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern,” said Lord Vetinari. “A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord,” said Mr. Burleigh. The Patrician looked down again at his notes. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order…

‘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.’

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

‘Well, there’s…’ Colon racked his brains. ‘There’s al-gebra. That’s like sums with letters. For…for people whose brains aren’t clever enough for numbers, see?’

She sighed again. She was familiar with the syndrome. They said they wanted a soulmate and helpmeet but sooner or later the list would include a skin like silk and a chest fit for a herd of cows.

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

And there was nothing finer than a wizard dressed up formally, until someone could find a way of inflating a Bird of Paradise, possibly by using an elastic band and some kind of gas.

'Can't argue with the truth, sir.' 'In my experience, Vimes, you can argue with anything.'

'One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,' said Vetinari, after some thought, 'is that they very seldom explode.'

... you couldn't really imprison someone like Leonard of Quirm. The most you could do was lock up his body. The gods alone knew where his mind went.

No wonder this man was a diplomat. You couldn’t trust him an inch, he thought in loops, and you couldn’t help liking him despite it.

I'm not a natural killer! See this? See what it says? I'm supposed to keep the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual!

Oh, there’s all the jokes about funny food and foreigners, but surely . . . Not very funny jokes, come to think of it.

No-one could be so simple, no-one could be so creatively dumb, without being very intelligent. It was like being an actor. Only a very good actor was any good at being a bad actor.

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.

“Look, Nobby, when all’s said and done they ain’t the right colour, and there’s an end to it.” “Good job you found out, Fred!” said Nobby, so cheerfully that Sergeant Colon was almost sure he meant it. “Well, it’s obvious,” he conceded. “Er… what is the right colour?” said Nobby. “White, of course!” “Not brick-red, then? ‘Cos you–” “Are you winding me up, Corporal Nobbs?” “‘Course not, sarge. So… what colour am I?” That caused Sergeant Colon to think. You could have found, somewhere on Corporal Nobbs, a shade appropriate to every climate on the disc and a few found only in specialist medical books. “White’s… white’s a state of, you know… mind,” he said. “It’s like… doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, that sort of thing. And washing regular.” “Not lazing around, sort of thing.” “Right.” “Or… like… working all hours like Goriff does.” “Nobby–” “And you never see those kids of his with dirty clo–” “Nobby, you’re just trying to get me going, right? You know we’re better’n Klatchians. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,’ said Carrot. ‘Really? Well, there’s eleven of them.’

…he wanted there to be conspirators. 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 brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable then of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was 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?

The Librarian shyly held out a small, battered green book. Vimes had been expecting something bigger, but he took it anyway. It paid to look at any book the orang-utan gave you. He matched you up to books. Vimes supposed it was a knack, in the same way that an undertaker was very good at judging heights.

... 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 to follow bad orders.

To history, choices are merely directions.

…the Patrician was against printing, because if people knew too much it would only bother them.

‘Odd thing, ain’t it…you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.’

71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no-one else believed.

The sudden appearance of a naked woman always caused a rethink of anyone’s immediate plans.

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

“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.”

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. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

The night is always old. He’d walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep.

‘Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.’

’A watchman IS a civilian, you inbred streak of piss!’

- The Last Continent. Rincewind series.

Rincewind has to save the world. This time in magical Australia.

People don’t live on the Disc any more than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls. Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the centre of their heads.

We might find out why mankind is here, although that is more complicated and begs the question ‘Where else should we be?’ It would be terrible to think that some impatient deity might part the clouds and say, ‘Damn, are you lot still here?’

Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly heavy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges. Research wizards have speculated that there is another, much speedier type of light which allows the slower light to be seen, but since this moves too fast to see they have been unable to find a use for it.

Wasn't it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?

Palaeontology and archaeology and other skulduggery were not subjects that interested wizards. Things are buried for a reason, they considered. There’s no point in wondering what it was. Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again.

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.

Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain calibre.

‘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.

‘…when you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy, you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.’

Rincewind woke with a scream, to get it over with.

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

A wizard without a hat was just a sad man with a suspicious taste in clothes.

Discworld constellations changed frequently as the world moved through the void, which meant that astrology was cutting edge research rather than, as elsewhere, a clever way of avoiding a proper job. It was amazing how human traits and affairs could so reliably and continuously be guided by a succession of big balls of plasma billions of miles away, most of whom have never even heard of humanity

‘Haven’t you ever noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?’ ‘Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that too,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.’ ‘Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.’ ‘Yes, but it’s the important one.’

It was an amazing phrase. It was practically magical all by itself. It just ... made things better. A shark’s got your leg? No worries. You’ve been stung by a jellyfish? No worries! You’re dead? She’ll be all right! No worries!

And they acted like savages*. * 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 behaviour more generally associated, oddly enough, with people wearing a full suit of clothes, often with the same insignia.

…the great, open ingenious purpose of UU was to be the weight on the arm of magic, causing it to swing with grave majesty like a pendulum rather than spin with deadly purpose like a morningstar. Instead of hurling fireballs at one another from fortified towers the wizards learned to snipe at their colleagues over the interpretation of Faculty Council minutes, and long ago were amazed to find that they got just as much vicious fun out of it. They consumed big dinners, and after a really good meal and a fine cigar even the most rabid Dark Lord is inclined to put his feet up and feel amicable towards the world, especially if it offered him another brandy.

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

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.

- Carpe Jugulum. Witches series.

The King accidentally invites a family of vampires to his daughter’s naming ceremony, and now that they’ve been invited in, they intend to make themselves at home.

Featuring the best, most scathing Twilight parody ever. Written about seven years before Twilight.

The wording began: ‘You are cordially invited…’ …and was in that posh runny writing that was hard to read but ever so official. Nanny Ogg grinned and tucked the card back on the mantelpiece. She liked the idea of ‘cordially’. It had a rich, a thick and above all an alcoholic sound.

In fact there are many things everyone knows about vampires, without really taking into account that perhaps the vampires know them by now, too.

When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch.* *Sometimes, of course, to say, ‘Please stop doing it.’

Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all the time and handed on the fight to their descendants. The chips on some shoulders had been passed down for generations. Some had antique value. A bloody good grudge, Lancre reckoned, was like a fine old wine. You looked after it carefully and left it to your children.

…one of the things a witch did was stand right on the edge, where the decisions had to be made. You made them so that others didn’t have to, so that others could even pretend to themselves that there were no decisions to be made, no little secrets, that things just happened.

The people of Lancre wouldn’t dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They’d done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they’d also found that it didn’t do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he’d be certain to want something different and so they’d have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practice the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the ploughing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them.

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.

Attractive men were not in plentiful supply in Lancre, where licking your hand and smoothing your hair down before taking a girl out was considered swanky.

‘But that’s just a bit of superstition, isn’t it? Witches don’t have to come in threes.’ ‘Oh, no. Course not,’ said Nanny. ‘You can have any number up to about, oh, four or five.’ ‘What happens if there’s more, then? Something awful?’ ‘Bloody great row, usually,’ said Nanny.

‘Vampires are very anal-retentive, you see?’ ‘I shouldn’t like meeting one that was the opposite,’ said Nanny.

‘Am I dyin’?’ YES. ‘Will I die?’ YES. Granny Weatherwax thought this over. ‘But from your point of view, everyone is dying and everyone will die, right?’ YES. ‘So you aren’t actually bein’ a lot of help, strictly speakin’.’

‘You wouldn’t let a poor old lady go off and confront monsters on a wild night like this, would you?’ They watched him owlishly for a while just in case something interestingly nasty was going to happen to him. The someone near the back said, ‘So why should we care what happens to monsters?’ And Shawn Ogg said, ‘That’s Granny Weatherwax, that is.’ ‘But she’s an old lady!’ Oats insisted. The crowd took a few steps back. Oats was clearly a dangerous man to be around. ‘Would you go out alone on a night like this?’ he said. The voice at the back said, ‘Depends if I knew where Granny Weatherwax was.’

‘Once people find out you’re a vampire they act as if you’re some kind of monster.

'All it takes is a little prick-' 'It's not going to be yours, mister!'

‘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.’ ‘Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes—’ ‘But they starts with thinking about people as things. . .’

He was trying to find some help in the ancient military journals of General Tacticus, whose intelligent campaigning had been so successful that he’d lent his very name to the detailed prosecution of martial endeavour, and had actually found a section headed What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not, but since the first sentence read ‘Endeavour to be the one inside’ he’d rather lost heart.

Holiness is where you find it.

-The Fifth Elephant. Watch series.

Politics, diplomacy, fat mines (fat mines!!!), werewolves, vampires, Modernity and Dwarf society and religion.

And Change. The big important kind.

This book introduces the Clacks and by doing that completely obliterates one of the pillars of Fantasy: Medieval Stasis (like, tbh, it was a process that started in Guards! Guards!—but more on that in Part 2) therefore marks a sort of point of no return: from here on I’m gonna give (even more) vague summaries because this book and pretty much every subsequent builds off (far more directly) of previous developments.

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

Dwarf bread was made as a meal of last resort and also as a weapon and a currency.

It was so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers, that it was largely unmapped. It was mostly unexplored, too*. *At least by proper explorers. Just living there doesn’t count.

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

‘Tell me, Leonard,’ he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that one day wars will be fought with brains?’ Leonard picked up his cup of coffee. ‘Oh dear. Won’t that be rather messy?’ he said.

‘Can you think of any reason why someone would kill him?’ The troll scratched his head. ‘Well, ‘cos dey wanted him dead, I reckon. Dat’s a good reason.’

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

The little flickering part of his brain that was still sparking coherent thought through the fog of mind-numbing terror that filled Colon’s head was telling him that he was so far out of his depth that the fish had lights on their noses.

Killing a stranger without malice or satisfaction, other than the craftsman’s pride in a job well done, is such a rare talent that armies spend months trying to instil it into their young soldiers.

‘…a lot of diplomacy lies in appearing to be a lot more stupid than you are.’

People in drought-stricken areas would have paid good money to have Igor pronounce ‘sausages’.

There was no such thing as a dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work.

‘Here, a butcher can be hanged if his sausages are not all meat, and at that it must be from a named domesticated animal, and I perhaps should add that by named I do not mean that it should have been called ‘Spot’ or ‘Ginger’…’

...there was probably an expensive problem here, so the guards were inclined to leave it to someone who earned more money than them.

‘When people say “We must move with the times,” they really mean “You must do it my way.”’

Well, he thought, so this is diplomacy. It’s like lying, only to a better class of people.

‘Dem diplomatics all want you to come for drinky-poos an’ stories about chickens,’ the troll added helpfully. ‘Cocktails, I think you’ll find,’ said Vimes...

...Sam Vimes had learned a lot from watching Lady Sybil. She didn’t mean to act like that, but she’d been born to it, into a class that had always behaved this way: you went through the world as if there was no possibility that anyone would stop you or question you, and most of the time that’s exactly what didn’t happen.

‘Ah, this must be the famous Ankh-Morpork sense of humour, yes?’ ‘No, that was just irony,’ Vimes shouted, still looking for an arboreal escape route. ‘You’ll know when we’ve got on to the famous Ankh-Morpork sense of humour when I start talking about breasts and farting, you smug bastard!’

‘It wasn’t until ten years ago that they replaced trial by ordeal here with trial by lawyer, and that was only because they found that lawyers were nastier.’

It wasn’t just that his brain was writing cheques that his body couldn’t cash. It had gone beyond that. Now his feet were borrowing money that his legs hadn’t got, and his back muscles were looking for loose change under the sofa cushions.

Now this he understood. He was never at ease with politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as ‘bad’. It was all too complicated and, where it was complicated, it meant that someone was trying to fool you.

- The Truth. Stand-alone, sort of, since it’s set in Ankh-Morpork.

Continues with the themes of Change and Modernity, this time with movable type.

Also depressingly relevant.

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 dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

"The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret"

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted.

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! And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who has no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.

It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand.

‘And these are your reasons, my Lord?’ ‘Do you think I have others?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.’ Hughnon reflected that ‘entirely transparent’ meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all.

‘We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,’ he said. ‘We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.’

He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where ‘traditional values’ meant ‘hang someone’.

‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’

Moving his hands carefully, Dibbler opened the special section of his tray, the high-class one that contained sausages whose contents were 1) meat, 2) from a known four-footed creature, 3) probably land-dwelling.

…William wondered why he always disliked people who said ‘no offence meant’. Maybe it was because they found it easier to say ‘no offence meant’ than actually refrain from giving offence.

Truth was what he told. Honesty was sometimes not the same thing.

‘Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘There’re still some around, aren’t there?’

When people say clearly something, that means there’s a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all.

‘But I’m not doing anything wrong,’ said William. ‘No, it may just be you’re not doing anything illegal,’ said Vimes.

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It’s one of those words that describes something that does not make a noise, but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss.

Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day.

Goodmountain grinned. ‘Don’t worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn’t anymore.’ ‘What changed his mind?’ ‘I reckon it was the dying that did it.’

…sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

‘…a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on…’

- Thief of Time. Death series. Actually about the History Monks- “The Men In Saffron“.

The Auditors are back again, Susan is sick and tired of it all, and Lobsang Ludd and Jeremy Clockson are very strange young men. Basically Men in Black+James Bond+A Whole Lot Of Kung Fu Films. Also death by chocolate.

‘I have heard the heartbeat of the universe. I know the answers to many questions. Ask me.’ The apprentice gave him a bleary look. It was too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning. That was the only thing he currently knew for sure. ‘Er…what does master want for breakfast?’ he said. Wen looked down in their camp and across the snowfields and purple mountains to the golden daylight creating the world, and mused upon certain aspects of humanity. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘One of the difficult ones.’

‘Sometimes I really think people ought to have to pass a proper exam before they're allowed to be parents. Not just the practical, I mean.’

‘‘scuse me,’ said the raven, ‘but how come Miss Ogg became Mrs Ogg? Sounds like a bit of a rural arrangement, if you catch my meaning.’ WITCHES ARE MATRILINEAL, said Death. THEY FIND IT MUCH EASIER TO CHANGE MEN THAN TO CHANGE NAMES.

Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available. He was puzzled that people seemed to think he was a boring conversationalist. Why, he could talk about all kinds of clocks. Mechanical clocks, magical clocks, sand clocks, cuckoo clocks, the rare Hershebian beetle clocks… But for some reason he always ran out of listeners before he ran out of clocks.

‘Questions don’t have to make sense, Vincent,’ said Miss Susan. ‘But answers do.’

‘…as you accumulate years, you will learn that most answers boil down, eventually, to “Because”.’

‘Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.’

‘Dojo! What is Rule One?’ Even the cowering challenger mumbled along to the chorus: ‘Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men!’

‘We’re the most secret society you can imagine.’ ‘Really? Who are you, then?’ ‘The Monks of History.’ ‘Huh? I’ve never heard of you!’ ‘See? That’s how good we are.’

If children were weapons, Jason would have been banned by international treaty. Jason had doting parents and an attention span of minus several seconds, except when it came to inventive cruelty to small furry animals, when he could be quite patient. Jason kicked, punched, bit and spat. His artwork even frightened the life out of Miss Smith, who could generally find something nice to say about any child. He was definitely a boy with special needs. In the view of the staffroom, these began with an exorcism.

‘No one would be that stu-’ Susan stopped. Of course someone would be that stupid. Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World-Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

This is true. A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same branch of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking contains no calories.

‘When in doubt, choose to live.’

Around her, historians climbed library ladders, fumbled books onto their lecterns and generally rebuilt the image of the past to suit the eyesight of today.

Of the very worst words that can be heard by anyone high in the air, the pair known as ‘Oh-oh’ possibly combine the maximum bowel-knotting terror with the minimum wastage of breath.

‘You know the secret wisdoms that everyone seeks, monk.’ The bottle-washer paused. ‘No, I even suspect that you know the explicit wisdoms, the ones hidden in plain view, which practically no one looks for.’

Lu-Tze had long considered that everything happens for a reason, except possibly football.

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

‘…because in this world, after everyone panics, there’s always got to be someone to tip the wee out of the shoe.’

- The Last Hero. Sort of Rincewind, sort of Watch series, actually Cohen the Barbarian.

You know that poem? The one that goes “old age- something something- rage against the dying light“? well it’s like that x10000.

Pretty much hits you on the head with a mallet that we are no longer in the realm of Tolkienesque/Epic/Whossname Fantasy.

Actually an illustrated novel, with art by Paul Kidby and is ~~**~~*beautifuuull*~*~**~

That’s the advantage of space. It’s big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.

People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing. There’s nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there’s a big turtle is far less amazing that the fact that there is a turtle anywhere.

Most gods were people-shaped; people don’t have much imagination, on the whole. Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to imagine an animal god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone in a really bad mask. Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is why there are so many.

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 feeling stealing over me is that all these terms are defined by the hero. You could say: I am a hero, so when I kill you that makes you de facto, the kind of person suitable to be killed by a hero. You could say that a hero, in short, is someone who indulges every whim that, within the rule of law, would have him behind bars or swiftly dancing what I believe is known as the hemp fandango. The words we might use are: murder, pillage, theft and rape.’

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’.

‘I can read and write,’ said Evil Harry. ‘Sorry. Part of the job. Etiquette, too. You’ve got to be polite to people when you march them out on the plank over the shark tank... it makes it more evil.’

‘Some people say you achieve immortality through your children,’ said the minstrel. ‘Yeah?’ said Cohen. ‘Name one of your great-granddads, then.’

‘It doesn’t matter how you live and die, it’s how the bards wrote it down.’

What goes around, comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.

‘I’ve got a sword and it’s a good one, but all the bleedin’ thing can do is keep someone alive, listen. A song can keep some immortal.’

‘So much universe, and so little time.’

No one remembers the singer. The song remains.

- The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. Stand-alone.

A retelling of The Pied Piper story, sort of. Featuring clever rats, a very clever cat and a stupid looking kid.

First of the Young Adult Discworld books, although as far as Pratchett was concerned that’s only a matter of marketing. It shows.

Deals a lot with the glaring irony of humanity’s relationship with talking vs. non talking animals (makes sense in context).

‘Listen, Peaches, trickery is what humans are all about,’ said the voice of Maurice. ‘They’re so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.’

‘Everyone needs their little dreams.’ Maurice truly believed that, too. If you knew what it was that people, really, really wanted, you very nearly controlled them.

Cats didn’t have to think. They just had to know what they wanted. Humans had to do the thinking. That’s what they were for.

The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it.

‘And our lady friend, she thinks life works like a fairytale.’ ‘Well, that’s harmless, isn’t it?’ said Keith. ‘Yeah, but in fairy-tales, when someone dies…it’s just a word.’

It was very unusual for Maurice to feel sympathetic to anyone who wasn't Maurice. In a cat, that is a major character flaw.

‘If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become part of someone else’s story.’ ‘And what if your story doesn’t work?’ ‘You keep changing it until you find one that does.’

‘This is inhuman!’ said Rat-catcher 2. ‘No, it’s very human,’ said Keith. ‘It’s extremely human. There isn’t a beast in the world that’d do it to another living thing…’

Light has a smell. In the dank, damp cellars the sharp sulphur stink of the match flew like a yellow bird, rising on drafts, plunging through cracks. It was a clean and bitter smell and it cut through the dull underground reek like a knife.

‘A good plan isn’t one where someone wins, it’s where nobody thinks they’ve lost.’

- Night Watch. Watch series.

Happens nearly simultaneously with Thief of Time.

Sam Vimes, time travel, Revolution (so many Les Misérables references so many), Police brutality, totalitarian regimes, Change and Progress.

Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.

‘This is stupid. There’s barely a dozen of you. What can you do? All that stuff about “keeping the peace” – it’s rubbish, lads. Coppers do what they’re told by the men in charge. It’s always like that. What’ll you do when the new captain comes in, eh? And who’re you doing this for? The people? They attacked the other Houses, and what’s the Night Watch ever done to hurt them?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Vimes. ‘There you are, then.’ 'I mean the Watch did nothing, and that’s what hurt them.’

That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t the you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then.

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

…trouble is always easy to find, when you have enough people looking for it.

One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people make instead of thinking.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed… and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilisation. That was what civilisation meant. It meant the city.

{i really love this. i really really really love this. i could write a whole separate essay on why and how much i love this paragraph}

- The Wee Free Men. Tiffany Aching series. Young Adult novel.

Introduces Tiffany Aching, a.k.a. light of my life a.k.a. most relatable character in fiction a.k.a. the hero which every little girl ever needs and deserves. I cannot even begin to explain how much Tiffany means to me:

She had decided to become a witch.

She decided okay? not she was chosen not she had to, she decided. Like, if you have a young and/or impressionable relative (or just simply need comfort on the value of your choices) give them this book. And then the next one. And then the next. And by then they should be old enough to get the next one themselves.

Also introduces the Nac Mac Feagle- tiny blue men with Scottish accents (basically Highlander extras; all of them).

And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch. And Tiffany had thought: Where’s the evidence?

Susurrus…according to her grandmother’s dictionary, it meant ‘a low soft sound, as of whispering or muttering’. Tiffany liked the taste of the word. It made her think of mysterious people in long cloaks whispering important secrets behind a door…susurrususssurrusss…

They didn’t have to be funny, they were father jokes.

They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one amongst them, she knew, who could mend a kettle. What they did was sell invisible things. And after they had sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but didn’t often want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t know it was locked. ‘I can’t do,’ said Miss Tick, straightening up. ‘But I can teach!’

They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travellers, and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words like ‘corrugated iron’. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the maths teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.

If you didn't find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.

‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany. ‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man. ‘No,’ said Tiffany patiently. ‘It’s about zoology.’ ‘Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.’ ‘No, actually it isn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.’

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

And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

…if you trust in yourself…’ ‘Yes?’ ‘…and believe in your dreams…’ ‘Yes?’ ‘…and follow your star…’ Miss Tick went on. ‘Yes?’ ‘…you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.’

There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overheard and there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she’d read in the Almanack that ‘gibbous’ meant 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…’

That’s the trouble with a brain: it thinks more than you sometimes want it too.

‘Ye can just rush in. We always just rush in.’ ‘Aye, Big Yan, point well made. But ye gotta know where ye’re just gonna rush in. Ye cannae just rush in anywhere. It looks bad, havin’ to rush oout again straight awa’.’

‘What’s your name, pictsie?’ she said. ‘No’-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock, mistress. There’s no’ that many Feegle names, ye ken, so we ha’ to share.’

It’s amazing what a child who is quiet and observant can learn, and this includes things people don’t think she is old enough to know.

‘Them as can do, has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

‘…it was better to belong where you don’t belong than not belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there…’

Being right doesn’t always work.

No wonder we dream our way through lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really was…no one could stand that for long.

First you get the test, and then afterwards you spend years findin’ out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.

Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!

- Monstrous Regiment. Stand-alone.

Polly Perks dresses up as a man to join the army to look for her brother. Has some of the most gratifying twists if fiction.

Talks about gender roles, gender equality, war, power of belief, you know, the usual.

Think young male, that was the thing. Fart loudly and with self-satisfaction at a job well done…

‘Look, you know what I mean. You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.’

Several copies of the pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so. It was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.

‘It’s only your country when they want you to get killed!’ said Tonker.

‘…keep out of the way of officers, ‘cos they ain’t healthy. That’s what you learn in the army. The enemy dun’t really want to fight you, ‘cos the enemy is mostly blokes like you who want to go home with all their bits still on. But officers’ll get you killed.’

Polly had been soldiering for only a couple of days, but already an instinct had developed. In summary, it was this: lie to officers.

…you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.

‘Bein’ a soldier is not hard. If it was, soldiers would not be able to do it.’

There was this about vampires: they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were…what was the word…deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.

‘…he might be worth listening to. Even if you think he’ll only tell us lies. Because sometimes, sir, the way people tell you lies, if they tell you enough lies, well, they sort of…show you what shape the truth is, sir.’

It’s hard to be an ornithologist and walk through a wood when all around you the world is shouting: ‘Bugger off, this is my bush! Aargh, the nest thief! Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red!'

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to those who think they’ve found it.

…you only thought the world would be better if it was run by women if you didn’t actually know many women. Or old women, at least. Take the whole thing about the dimity scarves. Women had to cover their hair on Fridays, but there was nothing about this in the Book, which was pretty dar- pretty damn rigorous about most things. It was just a custom. It was done because it was always done. And if you forgot, or didn’t want to, the old women got you.

The pen might not be mightier than the sword, but maybe the printing press was heavier than the siege weapon. Just a few words can change everything…

-A Hat Full of Sky. Tiffany series.

The Tiffany books are more closely related than the other series sooo...

I can say that it features magical-alien possession though.

Over the last year or so Tiffany’s mother had been quite surprised, and a little worried, at Tiffany’s sudden thirst for education, which people in the village thought was a good thing in moderation but if taken unwisely could lead to restlessness.

It’s quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.

Even if it’s not your fault it’s your responsibility. Witches deal with things.

‘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 heid under water until he stops doin’ it, ‘tis the only cure. It can kill a man, the thinkin’.

‘AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!’ which is the traditional sound of a very small child learning that with balloons, as with life itself, it is important to know when not to let go of the string. The whole point of balloons is to teach small children this.

Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.

- Going Postal. Moist Von Lipwig series.

Set in Ankh-Morpork. Continues with the Change and Progress theme, just a lot more explicitly than before.

Introduces Moist Von Lipwig, master conman, visited by an angel.

This book is also the one where that GNU thing comes from, you may or may not have seen it used instead of RIP when people talk about Pterry’s passing.

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 it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.

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.

'Money is not a thing, it is not even a process. It is a kind of shared dream. We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money.’

Women are always significantly under-represented in secret orders.

‘…this place is curséd.’ ‘That’s cursed with an extra ed?’ ‘Yes sir. The worst kind.’

‘I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be... all those things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!’ 'No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipwig. You Have Ruined Business And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Food From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipwig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.’

‘Always move fast Mr Spools. You never know who’s catching up.’

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered able to answer, such as ‘Is this the laundry?’ ‘How do you spell surreptitious?’ and, on a regular basis: ‘Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.’

‘Gods tend to be more interested in prophets, not profits, a-ha.’ There were some blank looks from his fellow directors. ‘Didn’t quite get that one, old chap,’ said Stowley. ‘Prophets, I said, not profits,’ said Gilt. He waved his hand. ‘Don’t worry yourselves, it will look better written down.’

Always remember that the crowd which applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible.

A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken.

- Thud! Watch series.

Troll-dwarf politics. Also demonic possession.

…as the dwarfs say, where there is trouble you will always find a troll.

It started out as a perfect day. It would soon enough be an imperfect one, he knew, but just for these few minutes it was possible to pretend that it wouldn’t be.

…he talked about history and destiny and all the other words that always got trotted out to put a gloss on slaughter. It was heady stuff, except that brains weren’t involved.

He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.

‘War, Nobby. Huh! What’s it good for?’ he said. ‘Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?’ ‘Absol- Well, okay.’ ‘Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?’ ‘All right, I’ll grant you that, but -’

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

‘…if dere was a PhD in bein’ fick, youse wouldn’t be able to find a pencil.’

Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self.

Beating people up in little rooms…he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say ‘We’re the good guys’ and do bad-guy things.

Home was where you had to feel safe. If you didn’t feel safe, it wasn’t home.

‘…and that’s why I don’t like magic, captain. ’Cos it’s magic. You can’t ask questions, it’s magic. It doesn’t explain anything, it’s magic. You don’t know where it comes from, it’s magic! That’s what I don’t like about magic, it does everything by magic!’

Treat this as a learning experience. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go spare. But with precision.

‘What kind of creature defines itself by hatred?’

- Wintersmith. Tiffany series.

The things that make a Man, Responsibility, etc.

'...I choose. This I choose to do.’ It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head you couldn’t make them work at all.

And she always came. Always. But popular? No. Need is not the same as like.

Like a lot of people with big muscles, he got edgy about people who were strong in other ways.

‘We mus’ lay doon our lives for her if it comes to it.’ ‘How can ye do that when ye’re deid already?’ said Miss Treason sharply. ‘That’s a bit o’ a puzzler, right enough,’ said Rob, ‘so probably we’ll lay down the lives o’ any scunners who do wrong by her.’

It says something about witches that an old friend and an old enemy could quite often be the same person.

That was the big problem with being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it’s gone.

- Making Money. Moist series.

Economics, but with golems.

… people lower their voices in the presence of large sums of money.

… his presence was like a lead weight on a rubber sheet. It distorted the space around it. People didn’t immediately see him, but they sensed his presence.

‘My late husband always said that the only way to make money out of poor people is by keeping them poor.’

Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something to keep quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port.

… if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared wake up.

‘There are, some like to suggest, an infinite number of universes in order to allow everything that may happen a place to happen in. This is of course nonsense, which we entertain only because we believe words are the same as reality. Now, however, I can prove my point, since in such an infinity of worlds there would have to be one where I would applaud your recent action and, let me assure you, sir, infinity is not that big!’

‘… people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.’

What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far less messy, considerably more efficient and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden

‘You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.’

- Unseen Academicals. Wizards series.

Mostly about all the work necessary to keep something like Unseen University running. Also, Romeo and Juliet and football.

Nothing cleans stubborn stains like suppressed anger.

Learning had to be digested. You didn't just have to know, you have to comprehend.

'All her clothes might fall off. I am sorry about this, but it appears to be a by-product of the whole business of poetry.'

Sometimes if you wanted to go to the ball you had to be your own fairy godmother.

'And you are telling me I'm wrong. Are you?' 'I would rather you thought of me as suggesting a way in which you could be even more right.'

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

'… the more best you're capable of the more you should do.'

- I Shall Wear Midnight. Tiffany series.

Deals with Responsibility, Identity, Self-determination, etc.

Probably the darkest book of the whole series. You know, for kids!

'I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal.

… only blonde and blue-eyed girls could get the prince and wear the glittering crown. It was built into the world. Even worse, it was built into your hair colouring. Redheads and brunettes sometimes got more than a walk-on part in the land of the story, but if all you had was a rather mousy shade of brown hair you were marked down to be a serving girl.

'Poison goes where poison's welcome.'

'Sometimes what is legal isn't what is right, and sometimes it needs a witch to tell the difference.

…you didn't need to grind the faces of the poor if you taught them to do their own grinding.

…one day all of us will die but – a this is the important thing – we are not dead yet.

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, then you don't know where you are going. And if you don't know where you are going, you're probably going wrong.

- Snuff. Watch series.

A copper goes on holiday. Three guesses what happens there.

Because I haven’t read this one yet, nor the remaining two, there won’t be any quotes for them. (And really, like, if you haven’t decided if the writing’s up to your tastes by now, I don’t know what to tell you).

Well, okay just one:

What should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?

- Raising Steam. Moist series.

Knock, knock! ‘Who is it?’ ‘The industrial Revolution!’

- Shepherd's Crown. Tiffany series. Last book. Published posthumously. The Elves are back. I think.

Reading order

Right.

Because every book is self-contained, you could, technically, pick up any which one and go from there. This works best if you’re especially passionate about something and you want a book about that. Like, if you love theatre start with Wyrd Sisters, if you love opera and musicals go with Maskerade, if you have a special place in your heart for film and/or eldritch horror, Moving Pictures is the way to go.

But, I think that unless you are determined to read One And Only One Discworld book ever, this approach isn’t worth it for anything published after The Fifth Elephant. Except the Rincewind books, you can read those whenever.

Like, yes, The Truth is a book about journalism written by a journalist-turned-fantasy-writer but without any previous knowledge of the Disc, you loose a lot, and I mean a lot of context as to why the things that happen in it are happening when and where they are happening. For example, Pin and Tulip’s utter horror at the state of things in Ankh-Morpork does not have the same weight if you haven’t read how they got like that.

The thing is, like, a while back I was looking at the Amazon page for The Compleat Ankh-Morpork (bc Pratchett had just died and my knee-jerk reaction was to get everything he was involved in ever), a sort of tour-guide like thing that comes with a map and details pretty much every nook and cranny of Ankh-Morpork, and someone left a one-star review saying how “Discworld was “”“ruined””“ now” and “you’re not supposed to be able to make a map of it and it’s supposed to be “”“magical”““ and vague and it loses it charm on a map~” or something like that, and I remember thinking ‘boy oh boy how can you so utterly and completely miss the point?’

Of course there’s gonna be a map at some point! You can’t write over forty (hell, over fifty if we count the supplementary ones) books about something without getting to know it very, very, very well.

The whole charm of Discworld is that with every subsequent book it gets more palpable, more “real”, so to speak.

It starts as a parody of the Standard Fantasy SettingTM and then word by word, book by book becomes one of the richest most well developed fictional worlds ever put to print.

This is why, I personally, believe it to be best to start from the beginning.

Pratchett was never a bad writer. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic actually are not bad books. A bit aimless, maybe, but not bad. It’s just that the books get so much better sometime around Guards! Guards! (or maybe as early as Mort, or maybe only after Small Gods, depending on who you ask) that a lot of people feel that having The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic as your first impression of Discworld is like eating raw dough and calling it bread: The ingredients are there, but it’s not ready.

Having said that, we are still talking about 40+ books, a large and time consuming commitment (even if you’re like me and can and do go through 400~ pages in about 14-16 hours), so here are the books people usually recommend for you to get a feel on Pratchett’s writing and decide if it’s something you wanna get into at all:

Guards! Guards! because it sets the stage for pretty much every book set in Ankh-Morpork (which is more than half of them), most of the city’s key players as well as that specific balance of fantasy and social commentary that is characteristic of Discworld. Probably best put here:

It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

Small Gods because it’s a stand alone novel, both temporally and geographically removed from the rest of the series, but it still has all the wit and heart and core ideas and philosophies that the other books have.

And, I’ll say it again: If you only read one Discworld book ever, make it Small Gods.

Another recommended approach (by people who are not me) is to pick a series and read it all the way through. This is the official infographic by the publisher:

The series are colour-coded.

If you decide to go with that, a few things to keep in mind:

This approach works better for The Witches and Tiffany series since they are set away from Ankh-Morpork (or the influence of Ankh-Morpork) and their stories have far less to nothing to do with the themes of international law, globalisation and industrialisation than the other books are connected by.

This approach also works for The Rincewind series since most of his books are set in “”“Foreign Parts“”“ and don’t have a lot to do with the themes of international law, globalisation, industrialisation etc.

You can pretty freely get into Tiffany without having read the Witches, but it’s less fun.

You cannot freely get into Moist Von Lipwig without having read The Truth and at least some of the Watch, you miss out on far too much character depth.

To fully understand Carpe Jugulum you need to have read Small Gods (also from Feet of Clay onwards in the Watch series, Constable Visit is way more fun if you’ve read Small Gods).

To fully appreciate Unseen Academicals you need to have read Carpe Jugulum.

The events of Night Watch are only possible because Thief of Time happened, and you need to read the latter to fully understand the former.

Everything that happens from The Fifth Elephant onwards is connected and follows a timeline and while the books are self-contained it just makes a lot more sense to read them in order.

But really and honestly: just pick one you think seems interesting. All this reading order stuff, it does help people figure some stuff out but ultimately, it’s about what you think you’d most enjoy. After all, the books are already written, and they’re not going anywhere.

Another thing to consider: Discworld has been adapted into audio books, radio plays, theatre plays, comics, and for the screen:

There are three live action adaptations (Hogfather, (with Michelle Dockery as Susan), The Colour of Magic, and Going Postal, (with Charles Dance as the Patrician)) and two animated adaptations (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music (in both Death is voiced by Christopher Lee)).

There is also, supposedly, a City Watch TV series in the works but it’s all very hush-hush for now.

As far as the Fandom goes, I’ve yet to have a bad experience? Like, most people who I would consider part of the Discworld fandom are pretty laid-back types* -I could be horribly wrong of course, maybe I just haven’t noticed the bad parts- but in general the one thing that brings Discworld fans together in this is the ongoing crusade to make more Discworld fans - hence this... list? essay? I don’t even know.

The one thing that I feel people new to the series should know regarding the fans is that no-one really pays much attention to make spoiler warnings.

Which, okay, some of the books are 30+ years old, and they are part of the opening premise for subsequent books... But still, things that make really satisfying twists and developments are taken completely for granted. (this mostly pertains to the Watch series).

So, just keep that in mind when engaging the fandom side of things.

*I firmly believe that the main contributing factor to the lack of DramaTM is the fact that most of the cast is 40+ years old** and either asexual or married - to well developed and rounded love interests.

**Did I mention the sheer number of Middle-aged and Old People Who Do Stuff in these books? No? There are so many Middle-aged and Old People Who Do Stuff in these books. And they’re mostly women.

Well, that’s about it folks.

Thanks for joining me for this ride. Any suggestions, questions etc. feel free to hit me up.

Finally, as a sort of closing remark:

“And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it. “

- From a speech given by Terry Pratchett at Noreascon 4 (2004), collected in A Slip of the Keyboard as “Straight from the Heart, via the Groin”

#discworld #Terry Pratchett #gnu terry pratchett #m posts #m writes #vidi olja

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