tribute: Small Gods

dat/tribute

@@ -342,15 +342,210 @@ managed it from the cat.
 #
 #
 #
-%title Small Gods (2)
+%title Small Gods (12)
 %passage 1
-He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.
+He says gods like to see an atheist around.  Gives them something to aim at.
 
   [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 %passage 2
-Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation
-too, o'course. 
+Pets are always a great help in times of stress.  And in times of starvation
+too, o'course.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 3 (Harper Torch edition)
+%passage 3
+So history has its caretakers.
+
+They live ... well, in the nature of things they live wherever they are
+sent, but their /spiritual/ home is in a hidden valley in the high Ramtops
+of the Discworld, where the books of history are kept.
+
+These aren't books in which the events of the past are pinned like so many
+butterflies to a cork.  These are the books from which history in derived.
+There are more than twenty thousand of them, each one is ten feet high,
+bound in lead, and the letters are so small that they have to be read with
+a magnifying glass.
+
+When people say "It is written ..." it is written /here/.
+
+There are fewer metaphors than people think.
+
+Every month the abbot and two senior monks go into the cave where the
+books are kept.  It used to be the duty of the abbot alone, but two other
+reliable monks were included after the unfortunate case of the 59th Abbot,
+who made a million dollars in small bets before his fellow monks caught up
+with him.
+
+Besides, it's dangerous to go in alone.  The sheer concentratedness of
+History, sleeting past soundlessly out into the world, can be overwhelming.
+Time is a drug.  Too much of it kills you.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# pp. 4-5
+%passage 4
+It was the Year of the Notional Serpent, or two hundred years after the
+Declaration of the Prophet Abbys.
+
+Which meant that the time of the 8th Prophet was imminent.
+
+That was the reliable thing about the Church of the Great God Om.  It had
+very punctual prophets.  You could set your calendar by them, if you had
+one big enough.
+
+And, as is generally the case around the time a prophet is expected, the
+Church redoubled its efforts to be holy.  This was very much like the
+bustle you get in any large concern when the auditors are expected, but
+tended towards taking people suspected of being less holy and putting them
+to death in a hundred ingenious ways.  This is considered a reliable
+barometer of the state of one's piety in most of the really popular
+religions.  There's a tendency to declare that there is more backsliding
+around than in the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be
+torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, and
+that it's time to wipe the slate clean.  Blood is generally considered
+very efficient for this purpose.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 60 ("he" is a tortoise, unnoticed among a large crowd of people)
+%passage 5
+He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet.  He had
+no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly
+because he was thinking.  Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the
+same time.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 60 (same page as preceding passage)
+%passage 6
+There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended
+largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and
+exactly how things should be.  After all, those who had achieved success
+in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God,
+because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His
+/disapproval/.  In the same way, the Quisition could act without
+possibility of flaw.  Suspicion was proof.  How could it be anything else?
+The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds
+of His exquisitors unless it was /right/ that it should be there.  Life
+could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om.  And sometimes
+quite short, too.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 92 ([sic] first paragraph ought to have fourth '.' to end sentence)
+%passage 7
+The memory stole over him:  a desert is what you think it is.  And now,
+you can think clearly ...
+
+There were no lies here.  All fancies fled away.  That's what happened in
+all deserts.  It was just you, and what you believed.
+
+What have I always believed?
+
+That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not
+according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent
+and honest /inside/, then it would, in the end, more or less, turn out
+all right.
+
+You couldn't get that on a banner.  But the desert looked better already.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 114
+%passage 8
+Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick
+as thin soup.  Brutha knocked.
+
+"Enter."(1)
+
+(1) Words are the litmus paper of the mind.  If you find yourself in the
+power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go
+somewhere else very quickly.  But if they say "Enter," don't stop to pack.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 141 (at the end, Xeno is almost certainly agreeing with Ibid, but
+#         he /might/ be answering Brutha's last question)
+%passage 9
+"Are you all philosophers?" said Brutha.
+
+The one called Xeno stepped forward, adjusting the hang of his toga.
+
+"That's right," he said.  "We're philosophers.  We think, therefore we am."
+
+"Are," said the luckless paradox manufacturer automatically.
+
+Xeno spun around.  "I've just about had it up to /here/ with you, Ibid!" he
+roared.  He turned back to Brutha.  "We /are/, therefore we am," he said
+confidently.  "That's it."
+
+Several of the philosophers looked at one another with interest.
+
+"That's actually quite interesting," one said.  "The evidence of our
+existence is the /fact/ of our existence, is that what you're saying?"
+
+"Shut up," said Xeno, without looking around.
+
+"Have you been fighting?" said Brutha.
+
+The assembled philosophers assumed various expressions of shock and horror.
+
+"Fighting?  Us?  We're /philosophers/," said Ibid, shocked.
+
+"My word, yes," said Xeno.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 151
+%passage 10
+All over the world there were rulers with titles like the Exalted, the
+Supreme, and Lord High Something or Other.  Only in one small country was
+the ruler elected by the people, who could remove him whenever they
+wanted--and they called him the Tyrant.
+
+The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote.(1)  Every five
+years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he
+was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy.  Immediately after he
+was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal
+madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher
+in the street looking for a towel.  And then five years later they elected
+another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent
+people kept on making the same mistakes.
+
+(1) Provided that we wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of
+being mad, frivolous, or a woman.
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 239
+%passage 11
+"I still don't see how one god can be a hundred different thunder gods.
+They all look different ..."
+
+"False noses."
+
+"What?"
+
+"And different voices.  I happen to know Io's got seventy different hammers.
+Not common knowledge, that.  And it's just the same with mother goddesses.
+There's only one of 'em.  She just got a lot of wigs and of course it's
+amazing what you can do with a padded bra."
+
+  [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 265
+%passage 12
+An hour later the lion, who was limping after Brutha, also arrived at the
+grave.  It had lived in the desert for sixteen years, and the reason it had
+lived so long was that it had not died, and it had not died because it
+never wasted handy protein.  It dug.
+
+Humans have always wasted handy protein ever since they started wondering
+who had lived in it.
+
+But, on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion.
 
   [Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
@@ -2383,7 +2578,7 @@ looking at.
 # Used for interaction with Death.
 #
 %section Death
-%title Death Quotes (6)
+%title Death Quotes (7)
 %passage 1
 WHERE THE FIRST PRIMAL CELL WAS, THERE WAS I ALSO. WHERE MAN IS, THERE AM I. WHEN THE LAST LIFE CRAWLS UNDER FREEZING STARS, THERE WILL I BE.
 %e passage
@@ -2408,5 +2603,9 @@ HAVE YOU SPOKEN TO RONNIE LATELY?
 %passage 6
 PLEASE DO NOT PANIC.  YOU ARE MERELY DEAD.
 %e passage
+# Small Gods, p. 90 (Harper Torch edition)
+%passage 7
+THERE IS A LITTLE CONFUSION AT FIRST.  IT IS ONLY TO BE EXPECTED.
+%e passage
 %e title
 %e section