tribute: Snuff

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PatR
2015-12-27 01:46:12 -08:00
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@@ -5265,17 +5265,259 @@ ag-rreeeed arr-angement, ye ken!"
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%title Snuff (2)
%title Snuff (16)
# p. 168 (Harper edition; 'ax' is spelled without the 'e' there...)
%passage 1
They were crude weapons, to be sure, but a flint axe hitting your head does
not need a degree in physics.
not need a degree in physics.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
%passage 2
It is a strange thing to find yourself doing something you
have apparently always wanted to do, when in fact up until
that moment you had never known that you always wanted to do it...
It is a strange thing to find yourself doing something you have apparently
always wanted to do, when in fact up until that moment you had never known
that you always wanted to do it...
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 2 (the subject is goblins)
%passage 3
At this point, Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, stopped reading
and stared at nothing. After a few seconds, nothing was eclipsed by the
form of Drumknott, his secretary (who, it must be said, had spent a career
turning himself as much like nothing as anything).
Drumknott said, "You look pensive, my lord," to which observation he
appended a most delicate question mark, which gradually evaporated.
"Awash with tears, Drumknott, awash with tears."
Drumknott stopped dusting the impeccably shiny black lacquered desk.
"Pastor Oats is a very persuasive writer, isn't he, sir...?"
"Indeed he is, Drumknott, but the basic problem remains and it is this:
humanity may come to terms with the dwarf, the troll and even the orc,
terrifying though all these have proved to be at times, and you know why
this is, Drumknott?"
The secretary carefully folded the duster he had been using and looked at
the ceiling. "I would venture to suggest, my lord, that in their violence
we recognize ourselves?"
"Oh, well done, Drumknott, I shall make a cynic of you yet! Predators
respect other predators, do they not? They may perhaps even respect the
prey: the lion may lie down with the lamb, even if only the lion is
likely to get up again, but the lion will not lie down with the rat.
Vermin, Drumknott, an entire race reduced to vermin!"
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 6
%passage 4
Vimes grunted. "Where there are policemen there's crime, sergeant,
remember that."
"Yes, I do, sir, although I think it sounds better with a little reordering
of the words."
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 46-47 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph; it's a
# long slog for a weak punchline...)
%passage 5
"[...] The third earl, 'Mad' Jack Ramkin, had a brother called
Woolsthorpe, probably for his sins. He was something of a scholar and
would have been sent to the university to become a wizard were it not for
the fact that his brother let it be known that any male sibling of his who
took up a profession that involved wearing a dress would be disinherited
with a cleaver.
"Nevertheless, young Woolsthorpe persevered in his studies in natural
philosophy in the way a gentleman should, by digging into any suspicious-
looking burial mounds he could find in the neighborhood, filling up his
lizard press with as many rare species as he could collect, and drying
samples of any flowers he could find before they became extinct. The
story runs that, on one warm summer day, he dozed off under an apple tree
and was awakened when an apple fell on his head. A lesser man, as his
biographer put it, would have seen nothing untoward about this, but
Woolsthorpe surmised that, since apples and practically everything else
always fell down, then the world would eventually become dangerously
unbalanced... unless there was another agency involved that natural
philosophy had yet to discover. He lost no time in dragging one of the
footmen to the orchard and ordering him, on the pain of dismissal, to lie
under the tree until an apple hit him on the head! The possibility of
this happening was increased by another footman who had been told by
Woolsthorpe to shake the tree vigorously until the required apple fell.
Woolsthorpe was ready to observe this from a distance.
"Who can imagine his joy when the inevitable apple fell and a second apple
was seen rising from the tree and disappearing at speed into the vaults of
heaven, proving the hypothesis that what goes up must come down, provided
that what goes down must come up, thus safeguarding the equilibrium of the
Universe. Regrettably, this only works with apples and, amazingly, only
the apples on this one tree, /Malus equilibria/! I hear that someone has
worked out that the apples at the top of the tree fill with gas and fly up
when the tree is disturbed so that it can set its seeds some way off.
Wonderful thing, nature, shame the fruit tastes like dog's business,"
Willikins added as Young Sam spat some out. [...]
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 100
%passage 6
"Look, Willikins, I don't like to involve you in all this. It's only a
hunch, after all."
Willikins waved this away. "You wouldn't keep me out of it for a big
clock, sir, because all this is tickling my fancy as well. I shall lay
out a selection of cutting edges for you in your dressing room, sir, and I
myself will go up to the copse half an hour before you're due to be there,
with my trusty bow and an assortment of favorite playthings. It's nearly
full moon, clear skies, there'll be shadows everywhere, and I'll be
standing in the darkest one of them."
Vimes looked at him for a moment and said, "Could I please amend that
suggestion? Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour
before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?"
"Ah yes, that's why you command the watch, sir," said Willikins, and to
Vimes's shock there was a hint of a tear in the man's voice. "You're
listening to the street, aren't you, sir, yes?"
Vimes shrugged. "No streets here, Willikins."
Willikins shook his head. "Once a street boy, always a street boy, sir.
It comes with us, in the pinch. Mothers go, fathers go--if we ever knew
who they were--but the Street, well, the Street looks after us. In the
pinch it keeps us alive."
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 116 (passage ends mid-paragraph)
%passage 7
Well, we live and learn, Vimes thought, or perhaps more importantly, we
learn and live. [...]
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 153
%passage 8
In the country, there is always somebody watching you, he thought as they
sped along. Well, there was always somebody watching you in the city, too,
but that was generally in the hope that you might drop dead and they could
run off with your wallet. They were never /interested/. But here he
thought he could feel many eyes on him. Maybe they belonged to squirrels
or badgers, or whatever the damn things were that Vimes heard at night;
gorillas, possibly.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 169-170
%passage 9
"Well, sir, it looks as though they're pleased to see us, yes?"
Feeney's relief and hope should have been bottled and sold to despairing
people everywhere. Vimes just nodded, because the ranks were pulling
apart, leaving a pathway of sorts, at the end of which there was,
inarguably, a corpse. It was a mild relief to see that it was a goblin
corpse, but no corpse is good news, particularly when seen in a grimy low
light and especially for the corpse. And yet something inside him exulted
and cried /Hallelujah!/, because here was a corpse and he was a copper
and this was a crime and this place was smoky and dirty and full of
suspicious-looking goblins and here was a /crime/. His world. Yes, here
was /his/ world.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 211
%passage 10
Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of gradually
being eaten by the pillows, and said to Sybil, "Do the Rust family have a
place down here?"
Too late he reflected that this might be a bad move because she might well
have told him all about it on one of those occasions when, so unusally for
a married man, he was not paying much attention to what his wife was
saying, and therefore he might be the cause of grumpiness in those
precious, warm minutes before sleep. All he could see of her right now
was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her, but she mumbled,
drowsily, "Oh, they bought Hangnail Manor ten years or so ago, after the
Marquis of Fantailer murdered his wife with a pruning knife in the
pineapple house. Don't you remember? You spent weeks searching the city
for him. In the end everybody seemed to think he'd gone off to Fourecks
and disguised himself by not calling himself the Marquis of Fantailer."
"Oh yes," said Vimes, "and I remember that a lot of his chums were quite
indignant about the investigation! They said he'd only done one murder,
and it was his wife's fault for having the bad taste to die after just one
little stab!"
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 212 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
%passage 11
[...] he had heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns
drinking champagne.(1) [...]
(1) This is, of course, absolutely true.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 217 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
%passage 12
"[...] and the Summoning Dark is /real/. It's not all in your head,
commander: no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too. Oh dear,
you of all people must recognize a substition when you're possessed by it?
It's the opposite of superstition: it's real even if you don't believe
in it. [...]"
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 233
%passage 13
Vimes frowned. He couldn't remember ever going into a church or a temple
or one of the numerous other places of more or less spirituality for any
other reason than the occasional requirements of the job. These days he
tended to go in for reasons of Sybil, i.e., his wife dragging him along
so that he could be seen, and, if possible, seen remaining awake.
No, the world of next worlds, afterlives, and purgatorial destinations
simply did not fit into his head. Whether you wanted it or not, you were
born, you did the best you could, and then, whether you really wanted to
or not, you died. They were the only certainties, and so the best thing
for a copper to do was to get on with the job. And it was about time
that Sam Vimes got back to doing his.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 254 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 14
[...] And maybe if I distinguish myself I can get a job in the city, so
that my mum can live in a place where you don't lie awake at night
listening to the mice fighting the cockroaches--hooray!(1)
(1) Regrettably, Constable Upshot was overly hopeful: in Ankh-Morpork the
mice and cockroaches had decided to forget their differences and gang up
on the humans.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 403 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
%passage 15
"[...] And I remember reading somewhere that you would arrest the gods
for doing it wrong."
Vimes shook his head. "I'm sure I never said anything of the sort! But
law is order and order is law and it must be the highest thing. The world
runs on it, the heavens run on it and without order, lad, one second
cannot follow another."
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 404 (footnote)
%passage 16
The sound of the gentle rattle of china cup on china saucer drives away
all demons, a little-known fact.
[Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage

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@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ wizard mode #wizintrinsic
reading non-cursed scroll of enchant weapon uncurses welded tin opener
if hero has no jumping ability but knows the jumping spell, the #jump command
will attempt to cast the spell
additional passages for Raising Steam
additional tribute passages for Snuff and for Raising Steam
Platform- and/or Interface-Specific New Features