Going Postal (Discworld, #33; Industrial Revolution, #4; Moist von Lipwig, #1)

by Terry Pratchett

People who step onto the air one hundred and fifty feet above the ground seldom have much to discuss afterwards.

Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.

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. Moist never tried it, knowingly anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly had to aim.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

Freedom may be mankind’s natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling.

all freedom is limited, artificial, and therefore illusory, a shared hallucination at best. No sane mortal is truly free, because true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes.

Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again. But, with its usual treachery, it went on working.

Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again.

you’ve got to learn to walk before you try to run, sir!” “No!” Moist’s fist thumped the table. “Never say that, Tolliver! Never! Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl! Keep moving forward! You think we should try to get a decent mail service in the city. I think we should try to send letters anywhere in the world! Because if we fail, I’d rather fail really hugely. All or nothing, Mr. Groat!”

You had to give people a show. Give them a show, and you were halfway to where you wanted to be.

It was a wizard’s study, so of course it had the skull with a candle on it and a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling. No one, least of all wizards, know why this is, but you have to have them.

That was an important rule of any game: always make it easy for people to give you money.

In the second year at school, you were precipitated out of the warm, easygoing kindergarten of Frau Tissel, smelling of finger paint, playdough, and inadequate toilet training, and onto the cold benches governed by Frau Shambers, smelling of Education. It was as bad as being born, with the added disadvantage that your mother wasn’t there.

But the Mended Drum could be depended upon. If someone didn’t come out of the door backwards and fall down in the street just as you passed, then there was something wrong with the world.

When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s.

ATTITUDE WAS EVERYTHING. Moist had studied attitude. Some of the old nobility had it. It was the total lack of any doubt that things would go the way they expected them to go.

These were the moments he lived for, when he was really alive, and his thoughts flowed like quicksilver, and the very air sparkled. Later, that feeling would present its bill. For now, he flew.

And so we progress, thought Moist. Always keep moving. There may be something behind you.

You knew that the man running the Find the Lady game was going to win, you knew that people in distress didn’t sell diamond rings for a fraction of their value, you knew that life generally handed you the sticky end of the stick, and you knew that the gods didn’t pick some everyday undeserving tit out of the population and hand them a fortune. Except that, this time, you might be wrong, right? It might just happen, yes? And this was known as that greatest of treasures, which is Hope. It was a good way of getting poorer really very quickly, and staying poor. It could be you. But it wouldn’t be.

And then it occurred to one or two of the board that the jovial “my friends” in the mouth of Reacher Gilt, so generous with his invitations, his little tips, his advice, and his champagne, was beginning, in its harmonics and overtones, to sound just like the word “pal” in the mouth of a man in an alley who was offering cosmetic surgery with a broken bottle in exchange for not being given any money.

“You don’t believe in any gods?” “No, of course not. Not while people like Reacher Gilt walk under the sky. All there is, is us.

“And it’ll give them hope,” she added, rather more quietly. “False hope,” said Moist, struggling upright. “Maybe not this time,” said Miss Dearheart. “That’s the point of hope.”

It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. Oh, yes. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start.

“Why do people like Gilt get away with it?” “I just told you. It’s because people hope. They’ll believe that someone will sell them a real diamond for a dollar. Sorry.”

ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn’t care.

If there’s one thing a wizard hates, it’s having to wait while the person in front of them is of two minds about coleslaw. It’s a salad bar, they say, it’s got the kind of stuff salad bars have, if it was surprising it wouldn’t be a salad bar, you’re not here to look at it. What do you expect to find? Rhino chunks? Pickled coelacanth?

“But I’m going to have my hands more than full with the Post Office!” Moist protested. “I hope you are. But, in my experience, the best way to get something done is to give it to someone who is busy,” said Vetinari.

They’d saved the city with gold more easily, at that point, than any hero could have managed with steel. But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever—provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look. This is known as Finance.

The people who guard the rainbow don’t like those who get in the way of the sun.