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“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?”
It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it anymore you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.
Wielding a sword, the Supreme Grand Master considered, was simply the messy business of dynastic surgery.
The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.
It was terribly cruel to do something like that to creatures whose only crime was to blow themselves absent-mindedly to pieces in mid-air, which was not something any individual dragon made a habit of.
Omnivores or not, what they must really live on was their nerves, flapping apologetically through the world in mortal fear of their own digestive system. The family would be just getting over father’s explosion, and some twerp in a suit of armor would come plodding into the swamp to stick a sword into a bag of guts that was only one step away from self-destruction in any case.
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.
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.
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.
There must be a million stories in the naked city, thought Vimes. So why do I always have to listen to ones like these?
