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

by Terry Pratchett

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?”

She had warm childhood memories of the place, she said, of climbing trees and swimming and fishing in the river, and picking flowers and helping the gardeners and similar jolly rural enterprises that were, to Vimes, as remote as the moon, given that his adolescent preoccupations had had everything to do with just staying alive. You could fish in the River Ankh, provided you took care not to catch anything. In fact it was amazing what you could catch by just letting one drop of the Ankh pass your lips. And as for picnicking, well, in Ankh-Morpork when you were a kid sometimes you nicked and sometimes you picked, mostly at scabs.

Sybil leafed through a small pile of pastel envelopes that had been inserted into her breakfast tray. “Well, the news has got around,” she said. “The Duchess of Keepsake has invited us to a ball, Sir Henry and Lady Withering have invited us to a ball, and Lord and Lady Hangfinger have invited us to, yes, a ball!” “Well,” said Vimes, “that’s a lot of—” “Don’t you dare, Sam!” his wife warned and Vimes finished lamely, “ . . .invitations?

And, er, Amanda, I think. Apparently quite interested in frogs, although I fear I may have misheard her mother. Rather a strange girl, according to her mother, who doesn’t seem to know what to make of her.”

“Oh, Hermione, she may be difficult as she has rather scandalized the family, at least in their opinion.” “How?” “She’s a lumberjack.” Vimes thought for a moment and said, “Well, dear, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a lot of wood must be in want of a wife who can handle a great big—”

“I do feel the absence of a parent sometimes and I have wondered whether it might be a sensible idea to go along to the cemetery at Small Gods and shout out ‘Dad, I’m going to be a copper,’ and then see which gravestone revolved, sir.”

He cleared his throat. “Well now, lad, what we appear to have here is a goblin who has been in a fight.” He looked down at the corpse, and then to Feeney. “Perhaps you would care to tell me what you see?” Feeney was one step away from trembling. “Well, sir, I surmise that it is dead, sir.” “And how do you deduce this, please?” “Er, its head isn’t attached to its body, sir?”

I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.

good people have no business being so bad. Goodness is about what you do. Not what you pray to.

Rabbit poo, Vimes noticed, was about the size of a chocolate raisin, a thought which instantly dragged him back to his youth, when if by some means, never entirely legal, he had acquired some cash, he would spend it on a ticket to the fleapit music hall and buy a packet of chocolate raisins with the change. Nobody knew, or cared to guess, what the things were that scuttled and scratched down below the seats, but you soon learned a very important rule: if you dropped your chocolate raisins, it was vitally important not to pick them up!

once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.

He was a scallywag, a chancer, a ruthless fighter and a dangerous driver of bargains over the speed limit. Since all this was a bit of a mouthful, he was referred to as a successful businessman, since that more or less amounted to the same thing.

Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase “The innocent have nothing to fear,” believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like “The innocent have nothing to fear”;

Lad, I’d rather ride a pig than a horse, if it’s all the same to you? I mean, pigs just run along, but horses? Most of the time I’ve got nothing against horses, and then I come down very firmly against horses, and then I’m shot up in the air again so that once more I have nothing against horses, but I know that in half a second the whole damn thing starts again, and yes before you come out with the whole business of “It’s all right if you rise up when they go down” let me say that has never ever worked for me, because then I’m either above and a little behind the horse or against the horse so firmly that I’m really glad that Sybil and I have decided to have only one child .

You beat up a dozen armed men single-handed?” “Oh aye, sir,” said Wee Mad Arthur slyly, “but it was nae fair, I had them outnumbered.

And then Sybil couldn’t contain herself anymore and burst out laughing. “Frankly, Sam, you may have anything you want for dinner tonight.” Vimes leaned over and whispered, causing his wife to slap his hand and say, “Later, perhaps!”

There was an apology from the ax-wielding Hermione, but according to her mother she was detained in the woods dealing with a very large and troublesome Pinus, which caused Vimes’s face to go blank until Sybil nudged him and pointed out that the pinus strobus was the official name for the white pine.

Vimes was totally amazed to find that the bestselling novel taking the Ankh-Morpork literary world by storm was dedicated to Commander Samuel Vimes. The title of the book was Pride and Extreme Prejudice.