And then it arose and struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn’t do worse, but then, he couldn’t do better. So maybe it balanced out.
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
[I.D.: a graphic using a quote from Guards! Guards!, with the words laid over blurred and darkened background images. The first picture is of flowers, and the words read “She couldn’t do worse,”. The second picture is of a dragon, and the words read “but then,”. The third picture is of an alleyway, and the words read “he couldn’t do better.”. The fourth picture is of a sculpture a woman holding scales, and the words read “So maybe it balanced out.”. End I.D.]
“IT’S A SWORD, IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.” My favourite scene from The Hogfather. ___ See how this comic was made here.
an obviously stolen copy of this crossed my dash last week, and i wanted to reblog the real thing. tracking down an image that originates in social media is a bit of hassle, but i am the citation fairy (sort of), and this is her quest. and she had to do whatever it took on this one. that only turned out to be less than 10 minutes, but she was prepared to put in a few hours. the hogfather lit the spark of her creation, and this is his night.
love when other main characters show up in a discworld book because they all have THEE funniest takes about each other. vetinari is above it all of course but polly perks meets vimes and is like jeez wtf is wrong with this guy. moist is extremely distrustful of vimes and vice versa. sacharissa likes moist and he likes her too but is also appropriately scared of her. there’s death’s passionate hatred of rincewind. ridcully and granny weatherwax dated. i guess tiffany was a little distracted by the feegle in the watch and um. everything when she met vimes but even she had time to be like jeez wtf is wrong with him…..oh and everyone hates william de worde
# we’re all That Annoying Bastard to someone (via the-tao-of-fandom)
I deeply appreciate the fact that Discworld translators add their own terrible, terriblepuns.
ID: Not sure where this screencap is from or what the source is, but it’s a block of text that reads: (punctuation added for clarity)
[Eg: Death is a Male character, and it was kept this way, but in French we say “La Mort” which is feminine. So the first time it is introduced, there is a note saying: “La mort est un mâle, un mâle nécessaire” meaning “Death is male, a necessary male,” punning on the saying “necessary evil” (mal nécessaire in French)]
[ID: a series of tweets by twitter user TheOperaGeek, on 6/8/2020.
“There were times when the world did not need policemen, because what it really did need was for somebody who knew what they were doing to shut it all down and start it all up again so that THIS time it could be done properly.” -Terry Pratchett, Snuff
“…but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? 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?” - Terry Pratchett, Snuff
“I’m not a natural killer! See this? See what it says? I’m supposed to KEEP the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I’m reading the wrong manual!” - Watch Commander Sam Vimes on policing (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)
“‘He asked you to shoot at people who weren’t shooting back,’ growled Vimes, striding forward. […] ‘They are throwing STONES, Sarge,’ said Colon. ‘So? Stay out of range. They’ll get tired before we do.’” - Sam Vimes on policing, again. (Terry Pratchett, Night Watch)
“No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.” - Terry Pratchett, THUD!
“And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say ‘we’re the good guys’ and do bad-guy things.” - Vimes on policing & excuses, part three. (Terry Pratchett, THUD!)
“But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.” - The Dragon on human nature, part two (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
“You couldn’t say ‘I had orders.’ You couldn’t say ‘It’s not fair.’ No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. […] Not ‘Thou Shalt Not” Say ‘I WILL NOT’.“ - Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
“And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for SOME reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.” - Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
“For the enemy is not Troll, nor is it Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good.” - Terry Pratchett, THUD!
She doesn’t know it yet, but she will soon. You see, the midterm paper on calls for students to write a collection evaluation for a library of our choosing. Now, I know that when she said that library does not need to be real, she meant that we didn’t need to pick a specific one. But what I heardwas…
For those of you requesting the full paper, I’ll see what I can do once I get the grade back!
I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED
For the sake of this evaluation, only the official, present collection of the Unseen University will be examined. Collections belonging to other libraries that are accessible via L-Space will be considered as part of the Interlibrary Loan System, as will materials available by time-travel and other such means.
Relatedly:
Whether or not acquiring books that have not yet been written is a violation of copyright law has yet to be legally clarified, but faculty and students should not expect to be permitted to cite them in their own work (see also Library Rule 3: Do Not Interfere With The Nature Of Causality).
Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action.
I don’t think they believed me.
welcome to the club
It is so, so difficult to explain to people that your favorite book is about transgender feminist dwarves, Nazi werewolves, and the mystery of a missing piece of really old ritual bread. And Opera saves the day.
yes, give us those sweet, sweet, terrible descriptions
A tortoise who’s really a god, finds an allegory for Jesus and they go on adventures in an ancient greece like place and then a desert
The chief of police averts a rerun of an ancient war, partially despite and partially because of being possessed by a dying dwarf’s graffiti
It’s like Les Miserables but Javert is the good guy and also there’s time travel.
Macbeth but it’s about the witches
Chapter one, the protagonist is hanged. Then he’s put in charge of the post office. Yes, in that order.
it’s like mulan if there were way more mulans in mulan and also pratchett is extra irritated that too many people missed the point of jingo
The bureaucrats of the universe get annoyed at the paperwork humanity causes so they decide to steal Christmas. Replacement Christmas is done by Death and replacement Death is done by goth Mary Poppins, who is also in charge of the investigation.
these are all nice and accurate reasons to read discworld if you haven’t yet
Romeo and Juliet football AU but the other team is wizards
Hollywood????
An entire clan of tattooed, hairy, kleptomaniac, alcoholic Scotsmen decide a little girl is their new best friend whether she wants to be or not and she rescues her absolutely worthless brother by discovering the power of selfishness.
Someone is dying, journalism is being invented, and part of Pulp Fiction is going on in the background.
The universes burocrats want to measure everything so they pay a man to imprison time so everything will stop and they can measure things in peace. Goth mary Poppins saves the day, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is the best Milkman in the world, and chocolate saves the day. Also someone was born twice.
Classic dynastic machinations are happening in fantasy China, to be completely overturned by a gang of elderly barbarian heroes and the world’s worst wizard and best sprinter
A sad, pathetic male of his species re-plumbs the depths of his soul and saves the city by wooing a powerful female. The same thing happens to a dragon.
Discworld quotes that make you stare at the wall, please add your own:
You fear tomorrow, and you’ve made your fear your god.
–Monstrous Regiment
Poison goes where poison’s welcome.
–I Shall Wear Midnight
People start off believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.
–Small Gods
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.
–Night Watch
They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.
–Guards! Guards!
And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
–Carpe Jugulum
If there is a supreme being, I told myself, then it is up to us to become its moral superior.
– Unseen Academicals (off the top of my head so the wording may be a little off)
I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.
– Snuff
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
– Hogfather
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
– A Hat Full of Sky
All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
The Wee Free Men
And of course:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Also: In my mind his whole team is Herdier, mightyena, drapion (which I didn’t want to draw so I drew it’s younger self), noctowl (because owl= morpork), rattata, and hippowdon (because of the ankh morpork crest)
