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tribute: Feet of Clay

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@@ -1168,7 +1168,7 @@ horse. It was an observation that had served him well.
"You can--"
"An?"
"Ah?"
Truckle shut his eyes and clenched his fists.
@@ -1473,20 +1473,227 @@ Come on. I want to try a leg of the elephant that bit me."
#
#
#
%title Feet of Clay (2)
%title Feet of Clay (14)
%passage 1
Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through
anything. It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need
people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever
touching lips.
touching lips.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 337 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
It was hard enough to kill a vampire. You could stake them down and turn
It was hard enough to kill a vampire. You could stake them down and turn
them into dust and ten years later someone drops a drop of blood in the
wrong place and guess who's back? They returned more times than raw
broccoli.
wrong place and /guess who's back/? They returned more times than raw
broccoli.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 4
%passage 3
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only
because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't
look quite like real science.(1) But geography is only physics slowed
down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of
excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time.
It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south
for the winter.
(1) That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra
legs and then blow it up.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 19
%passage 4
Upstairs, Vimes pushed open his office door carefully. The Assassins'
Guild played to rules. You could say that about the bastards. It was
terribly bad form to kill a bystander. Apart from antyhing else, you
wouldn't get paid. So traps in his office were out of the question,
because too many people were in and out of it every day. Even so, it
paid to be careful. Vimes /was/ good at making the kind of rich enemies
who could afford to employ assassins. The assassins had to be lucky
only once, but Vimes had to be lucky all the time.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 86 (passage continues, actually finding an image in dead man's eyes)
%passage 5
"Er ... have you ever heard the story about dead men's eyes, sir?"
"Assume I haven't had a literary education, Littlebottom."
"Well ... they say ..."
"/Who/ say?"
"/They/, sir. You know, /they/."
"The same people who're the 'everyone' in 'everyone knows'? The people
who live in 'the community'?"
"Yes, sir. I suppose so, sir."
Vimes waved a hand. "Oh, /them/. Well, go on."
"They say that the last thing a man sees stays imprinted in his eyes, sir."
"Oh, /that/. That's just an old story."
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 127-128
%passage 6
Everyone in the city looked after themselves. That's what the guilds were
for. People banded together against other people. The guild looked after
you from the cradle to the grave or, in the case of the Assassins, to
other people's graves. They even maintained the law, or at least they had
done, after a fashion. Thieving without a license was punishable by death
for the first offense.(1) The Thieves' Guild saw to that. The arrangement
sounded unreal, but it worked.
It worked like a machine. That was fine except for the occasional people
who got caught in the wheels.
(1) The Ankh-Morpork view of crime and punishment was that the penalty for
the first offence should prevent the possibility of a second offense.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 129, continued pp. 132-133
%passage 7
Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head, and set off after it. No
thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and
policemen to chase anything that runs away.
[...]
Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure. It wasn't quite
so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning
stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled
pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out from a cross street.(1)
(1) This always happens in any police chase /anywhere/. A heavily laden
lorry will /always/ pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit. If
vehicles aren't involved, then it'll be a man with a rack of garments.
Or two men with a large sheet of glass. There's probably some kind of
secret society behind all this.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 165
%passage 8
Ron had a small grayish-brown, torn-eared terrier on the end of a string,
although in truth it would be hard for an observer to know exactly who
was leading whom and who, when push came to shove, would be the one to
fold at the knees if the other shouted "Sit!" Because, although trained
canines as aids for those bereft of sight, and even of hearing, have
frequently been used throughout the universe, Foul Ole Ron was the first
person ever to own a Thinking-Brain Dog.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# pp. 173-174
%passage 9
Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues.
He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They
got in the way.
And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man
and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir. I can tell
you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some
years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and
then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance
and the state of a man's boots, when /exactly the same/ comments could
apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a
spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tatooed
once when he was drunk and seventeen(1) and in fact got seasick on a wet
pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety
of the human experience.
It was the same with more static evidence. The footprints in the
flowerbed were probably /in the real world/ left by the window-cleaner.
The scream in the night was quite likely a man getting out of bed and
stepping sharply on an upturned hairbrush.
The real world was far too /real/ to leave neat little hints. It was full
of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got
at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of
eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions
and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you
just hoped like hell that some bugger's nerve'd crack and he'd give himself
up.
(1) These terms are often synonymous.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 188
%passage 10
"Life has certainly been more reliable under Vetinari," said Mr. Potts of
the Bakers' Guild.
"He does have all the street-theater players and mime artists thrown into
the scorpion pit," said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves' Guild.
"True. But let's not forget that he has his bad points too. [...]"
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 198
%passage 11
What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told
him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve
/that/?
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 295
%passage 12
Rogers the bulls were angry and bewildered, which counts as the basic state
of mind for full grown bulls.(1)
(1) Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls'
view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping
hemispherical view of the world. Since there were two separate visions,
Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls not having
been bred for much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe this, which is
why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at
you. They do this because both of them want to see.
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 312 ('meaning' line capitalizes every word, including 'A','For','To')
%passage 13
"It's the most menacing dwarf battle-cry there is! Once it's been shouted
/someone/ has to be killed!"
"What's it mean?"
"Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
# p. 347 (Colon is addressing Dorfl, a golem who is joining the Watch)
%passage 14
"Y'know," said Colon, "if it doesn't work out, you could always get a job
making fortune cookies."
"Funny thing, that," said Nobby. "You never get bad fortunes in cookies,
ever noticed that? They never say stuff like: 'Oh dear, things are going
to be /really/ bad.' I mean, they're never /misfortune/ cookies."
Vimes lit a cigar and shook the match to put it out. "That, Corporal, is
because of one the fundamental driving forces of the universe."
"What? Like, people who read fortune cookies are the lucky ones?" said
Nobby.
"No. Because people who /sell/ fortune cookies want to go on selling
them. [...]"
[Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
@@ -2180,8 +2387,9 @@ looking at.
%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
# Feet of Clay, p. 17 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 2
I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. *I* TURN UP ONLY ONCE.
I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. /I/ TURN UP ONLY ONCE.
%e passage
# Men at Arms, p. 27 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 3