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June 17 - June 18, 2015
If it were funny, clowns wouldn’t be doing it.
Sam Vimes could parallel process. Most husbands can. They learn to follow their own line of thought while at the same time listening to what their wives say. And the listening is important, because at any time they could be challenged and must be ready to quote the last sentence in full.
No one cares enough about you to want to kill you.
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.
Nasty place, Uberwald. I heard where it’s a misery wrapped in an enema.
“Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.” Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean . . . you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”
“Across the whole of the world, Your Grace, there inexplicably appear to be definitions of, mmm, mhm, ‘good guy’ which do not automatically mean ‘likes Ankh-Morpork.’
“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 lying, only for a better class of people.
“But this isn’t a real crime anymore, is it?” said Vimes. “This is politics.
He shouldered his way through the throng after the performance, which from the humans present had received the usual warm reception that such things always got from people who hadn’t really understood what was going on but rather felt that they should have.
There was nothing really daft that some foreigner wouldn’t do, somewhere.
There is a saying: It won’t get better if you picket.
It was dullness hammered into the shape and form of ceremony.
But in the roaring air he knew that it was, in the minds of all who needed to believe, and in a belief so strong that fact was not the same as truth . . . he knew that for now, and yesterday, and tomorrow, it was both the thing, and the whole of the thing.
Didn’t you worry about the future?” “No.” “Why the hell not?” “It hasn’t happened yet.
On the other hand . . . the world wasn’t moved by heroes or villains or even by policemen. It might as well be moved by symbols. All he knew was that you couldn’t hope to try for the big stuff, like world peace and happiness, but you might just about be able to achieve some tiny deed that’d make the world, in a small way, a better place.
*As a member of the dead community, Reg Shoes naturally thought of himself as an ethnic majority.
*He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: It fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination—but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.
