Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch, #8)

by Terry Pratchett

The trouble with you, Sam Vimes, is that you’re determined to be your very own class enemy.”

no policeman swears allegiance to the civil power, he swears allegiance to the law. Oh, politicians can change the law, and if the copper doesn’t like it then he can quit, but while he is in the job it’s up to him to act in accordance with the law as laid down.”

It is definitely a book of fantasy

Blimey, the lies we tell ourselves . .

He unrolled a crime sheet that badly needed the laundry: no major murders, just nastiness, silliness and all the crimes of human ignorance and stupidity. Of course, where there were people there was crime. It just seemed out of place in the slow world of big spaces and singing birds. And yet he’d smelled it as soon as he was here and now he was in the middle of it.

There never was a good policeman who didn’t have a slice of villain somewhere in him, and this will call to you. It will say ‘This man has something to hide,’ or ‘This man is far more frightened than he should be’ or ‘This man is acting too cocky by half because underneath he’s a bag of nerves.’ It will call to you.”

It was a leap in the dark, but, hell, he had leapt so often that the dark was a trampoline.

while all coppers must have a bit of villain in them, no copper should walk around with a piece of demon as a tattoo.

I’m not the law, no policeman is the law.

Do the right thing and fudge the paperwork afterward, like I do.”

He had never been very much of a one for thinking in terms of good or bad and guilty or not guilty. He had learned to think in terms of us and them and dead and not dead.

That’s one thing you learned in the military. You don’t last long if you’re a killer. Killing as duty called was another thing entirely.

nuisance. It seemed to him that the gossip around the table was trite, artificial, like the conversation of raw recruits on the eve of their first battle. He thought, there’s a warrant out for Commander Vimes, hero of Koom Valley (Bloody good show! Wonderful execution. Peace in our time between brother troll and brother dwarf and that sort of thing. Just the job! I’ve seen too much killing in my time) and now you are going to put him out of a job and a reputation, just because that greasy lad with a name like a pregnant frog has charmed you into doing so.

You apply one law for the poor and none for the rich, my dear, because the poor are such a nuisance.

you were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong.

I think the safest place to be right now is behind you, sir.”

the hated have no reason to love!

was a bit damp around the socks that day, and I don’t mind admitting it. Think of it as a kind of baptism!”

no corpse is good news, particularly when seen in a grimy low light and especially for the corpse. And yet something inside him exulted and cried Hallelujah!, because here was a corpse and he was a copper and this was a crime and this place was smoky and dirty and full of suspicious-looking goblins and here was a crime. His world. Yes, here was his world.

You’ve heard of the tobacco that counts? Well, he just had a cigar that cries.

“It’s an unggue pot,” Cheery said carefully. “A goblin ceremonial pot, sarge.”

“Well, of course that is so, sergeant, but you see, it already belongs to a goblin.”

there are times when you should shut up and get some new ideas in that big fat head of yours rather than constantly reheating the old ones.

given the floral decoration and its small size, that it is the one they call the soul of tears,

in that pot is the living soul of a goblin child and it belongs to you.

That night Sergeant Colon dreamed he was in a cave with monsters chattering away at him in their dreadful lingo.

These days he excused himself by remembering that most of the other kids felt the same way. When it came to the innocence of childhood, adults often got it wrong.

The closer you looked at the goblin the more it wasn’t there. Stare it down and it lost all its power to frighten.

“I hear that they are wretched, badly made mortals,” the dame had said sadly. “Half-finished folk, or so I hear. It’s only a blessing this one had something to be jolly about.”

doing so much looking that they forgot to see.

After a while it becomes a puzzle, not a corpse,

I reckon she stepped in a rabbit snare, probably because she was running away from . . .somebody.”

Isn’t there some kind of code? You kill the bucks, not the does, isn’t that right? And this isn’t some spur-of-the-moment thing! Someone wanted to get a lot of blood out of this lady! You tell me why!”

“This is murder, lad, the capital crime!

Hordes come in killing and stealing. This lot look like a bunch of worried people.

thank you for believing that goblins have names.

The goblin was a sigh on legs.

You say “ ‘This is my land,’ but you did not make the land. You did not make your sheep, you did not make the rabbits on which we live, you did not make the cows, or the horses, but you say, ‘These things are mine.’ This cannot be a truth. I make my ax, my pots, and these are mine. What I wear is mine. Some love was mine. Now it has gone.

it was all about survival, and survival was all about pride. You didn’t have much control over your life but by Jimmy you could keep it clean and show the world you were poor but respectable. That was the dread: the dread of falling back, losing standards, becoming no better than those people who bred and fought and stole

“If it was without their consent, then that would be slavery, and if a slave doesn’t work for his living he’s dead.

where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind.”

A crime unsolved is against nature.”

thought about who had actually rounded the goblins up three years ago. And then he thought, how important is that compared with the question who told them to?

people do what they’re told because they’ve always done what they’re told.

mustn’t be a bull at a gate, said Sybil, and she’s right. I need to know where I’m treading.

And she was named after the colors of a flower.”

if you take some time off, the guilty will be no less guilty, and the dead won’t get any less dead, and her ladyship will not try to behead you with a coat hanger.”

he waited for the onset of sleep, against a chorus of howls, shrieks, mysterious distant bangs, surreptitious rustlings, screeches, disconcerting ticking noises, dreadful scratching sounds, terrible flappings of wings very close, and all the rest of the unholy orchestra that is known as the peace of the countryside.

He had little experience of the literary world, much preferring the literal one,

For a moment Miss Beedle had that slightly glazed sheen often seen on the face of someone meeting Young Sam for the first time.

Tears of the Mushroom looked frantically for Miss Beedle while Young Sam, totally at ease, began a brief dissertation on sheep poo. In response, with words slapping together like little bricks, she said, “What . . .is . . .poo . . .for?”