imthedoctorbasicallyfunreads > imthedoctorbasicallyfunreads's Quotes

Showing 331-360 of 373
sort by

  • #332
    Terry Pratchett
    “That's a nice song," said young Sam, and Vimes remembered that he was hearing it for the first time.
    "It's an old soldiers' song," he said.
    "Really, sarge? But it's about angels."
    Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
    "As I recall, they used to sing it after battles," he said. "I've seen old men cry when they sing it," he added.
    "Why? It sounds cheerful."
    They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will.
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #333
    Terry Pratchett
    “Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #334
    Terry Pratchett
    “There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

    People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
    As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #335
    Terry Pratchett
    “His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #336
    Terry Pratchett
    “Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
    tags: law

  • #337
    Terry Pratchett
    “But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #338
    Terry Pratchett
    “Raising the flag and singing the anthem are, while somewhat suspicious, not in themselves acts of treason.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #339
    Terry Pratchett
    “You'd like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn't you, Comrade Sergeant?' said Reg encouragingly.
    'I'd like a hard-boiled egg,' said Vimes, shaking the match out.
    There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended.
    'In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher--'
    'Well, yes, we could,' said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of papers in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. 'But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #340
    Terry Pratchett
    “Winder's mind felt even fuzzier than it had done over the past few years, but he was certain about cake. He'd been eating cake, and now there wasn't any. Through the mists he saw it, apparently close but, when he tried to reach it, a long way away.

    A certain realization dawned on him.

    "Oh," he said.

    YES, said Death.

    "Not even time to finish my cake?"

    NO. THERE IS NO MORE TIME, EVEN FOR CAKE. FOR YOU, THE CAKE IS OVER. YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #341
    Terry Pratchett
    “Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #342
    Terry Pratchett
    “Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam.
    "Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?"
    "'cos they torture people.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #343
    Terry Pratchett
    “There was no universe, anywhere, where a Sam Vimes would give in on this, because if he did then he wouldn't be Sam Vimes anymore.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #344
    Terry Pratchett
    “The key to winning, as always, was looking as if you had every right, nay, duty to be where you were. It helped if you could also suggest in every line of your body that no one else had any rights to be doing anything, anywhere, whatsoever.”
    Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  • #345
    Seanan McGuire
    “Some adventures begin easily. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.
    Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.”
    Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

  • #346
    Seanan McGuire
    “The Moors exist in eternal twilight, in the pause between the lightning strike and the resurrection. They are a place of endless scientific experimentation, of monstrous beauty, and of terrible consequences.”
    Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

  • #347
    Seanan McGuire
    “There are worlds built on rainbows and worlds built on rain. There are worlds of pure mathematics, where every number chimes like crystal as it rolls into reality. There are worlds of light and worlds of darkness, worlds of rhyme and worlds of reason, and worlds where the only thing that matters is the goodness in a hero's heart.”
    Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

  • #348
    Seanan McGuire
    “The moon is the friendliest of the celestial bodies, after all, glowing warm and white and welcoming, like a friend who wants only to know that all of us are safe in our narrow worlds, our narrow yards, our narrow, well-considered lives. The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.”
    Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones
    tags: moon

  • #349
    Seanan McGuire
    “You're nobody's rainbow.
    You're nobody's princess.
    You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
    Seanan mcguire , Every Heart a Doorway

  • #350
    Seanan McGuire
    “Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #351
    Seanan McGuire
    “Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #352
    Seanan McGuire
    “This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #353
    Seanan McGuire
    “This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #354
    Seanan McGuire
    “Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid?" he asked. "Why would you want that much acid? You don't need that much acid."
    "Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving," said Jack. "Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn't 'let' me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day."
    "What were you expecting it to rain?" said Christopher. "Bears?”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #355
    Seanan McGuire
    “I think the rules where different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn't care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #356
    Seanan McGuire
    “The petty-minded fools here think surgery and butchery are the same thing.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #357
    Seanan McGuire
    “She'd known girls on diets her entire life. Iron-rich blood had rarely, if ever, been their goal. Most of them had been looking for smaller waists, clearer complexions, and richer boyfriends, spurred on by a deeply ingrained self-loathing that had been manufactured for them before they were old enough to understand the kind of quicksand they were sinking in.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #358
    Seanan McGuire
    “I don’t like corpses in that way unless they’ve been reanimated,” said Jack. “Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators.” “I wish that didn’t make so much sense,”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #359
    Seanan McGuire
    “We went down, and at the bottom there was a door, and on the door there was a sign. Two words. BE SURE. Sure of what? We were twelve, we weren't sure of anything.”
    Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

  • #360
    Mackenzi Lee
    “The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other's mouth.
    A long, slow slide, then a sudden impact.”
    Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

  • #361
    Mackenzi Lee
    “God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.”
    Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue



Rss