"And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."
Craig Hatler Vimes Boot is a thing Sam realizes late in his career. More full, the name is Sam Vimes's Boot Theory of Socioeconomic inequality.
A copper on the streets may buy a pair of cardboard shoes for 10 dollars. And they are kind of OK for a season or two, though they let in all the rain. And he's got to buy them again next year when they fall apart.
Meanwhile, the Duke of Ankh can buy a pair of shoes for $50 that last ten years, and are made of leather. They never let in the rain. And they'll last ten years, easy.
Over ten years, the guardsman has spent $100 and still has wet feet.
"There is a knocking without!" - "Without what?" - "Without the door!" - "How can there be a knocking without the door?" (quoted from memory, not sure what discworld novel it was. it was one of the witch stories.) Also, the concept of narrativium. And I remember "holey socks" from the third (?) book of nome, socks from a descendant of Arnold Bros. (For context, I read the nome trilogy in my teens, when I had only been learning English for a couple of years, and every pun I understood was a win.)
Vivian Spartacus And the invisible hat from Granny Weatherwax. and Tiffany Aching realizing that the Witching Contest isn't important, but looking eyes with Granny is.
Ohohoh, his conversation with Susan about belief from Hogfather, about believing the little lies so that we can have faith in the big ones like Justice, etc.
This quote? “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
Yes, all of that! I also like the one where he says that cats are good. :)
I wish I could find mine. I used to have it on like all of my social media profiles! It was something that really captured my attitude towards life, death, and the afterlife.
It points out that even if higher order notions don't exist, what matters is how believing in them affects us. That we are better -- where the rising ape meets the falling angels -- because we believe in the big lies.
Yep. I often wish I had the time, energy, and focus to read more Discworld in part because Susan is awesome and because honestly, Death's philosophical statements ring deeply true to me so much of the time.
DEATH is my favorite, too. I still chuckle when I think of the time a guy was pouring out gasoline in his shop to burn it down for in-sewer-ants, and someone hands him a match.
I like Ridcully (although Vimes is my favorite character in the books) because he gets things done. He's the antidote to the mysterious, powerful-but-never-uses-his-power, bearded mentors of other books. He would have flown on a giant eagle and just dropped the ring into the volcano already. He would have booted Tom Riddle out of school so fast his head would have spun.
"Yea, the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One"
"Psst!"
I'll always remember that line. I found Good Omens under a bench in front of a grocery store. I left it there, and came back a few hours later, and saw it still sitting there, so I took it. It was my first exposure to Pratchett.
Ridcully just so precisely matches my idea of what a wizard should be like. He's serious and shrewd and pragmatic in all the right ways, and then obtuse and ridiculous in all the right ways too.
From Reaper Man: "...it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place."
From Lords and Ladies: "‘I’m the head wizard now. I’ve only got to give an order and a thousand wizards will … uh disobey, come to think of it, or say “What?”, or start to argue. But they have to take notice.’"
From Soul Music: "The Archchancellor polished his staff as he walked along. It was a particularly good one, six feet long and quite magical. Not that he used magic very much. In his experience, anything that couldn’t be disposed of with a couple of whacks from six feet of oak was probably immune to magic as well."
From Interesting Times: "'Oh no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things we don’t understand.’
" ‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.' "
From Hogfather: "'That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?' "
From The Last Continent: "The worst thing about losing your temper with Mustrum Ridcully was that he never noticed when you did."
From Unseen Academicals: " '… you know how it is with boundaries,' Ridcully mumbled. 'You look at what's on the other side and you realize why there was a boundary in the first place.' "
There's another really good quote that I can't seem to find that was about how the purpose of the university wasn't to learn how to magic, but rather to learn how to not magic. Because we're all better off when wizards aren't doing magic.
I think I see a Pratchett marathon in my future. I should go find my waterlogged-twice-its-original-thickness copy of "Good Omens" that I've had since I was a Private...
“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!
Up to his neck in fish.
ReplyDeleteMost of them involve Sam Vimes.
ReplyDelete"Do the job that's in front of you"
"That's the thing about revolutions--they come around again"
"And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."
ReplyDeletefrom Unseen Academicals
Yanni Cooper Remind me about that one? My brain isn't coming up with much.
ReplyDeleteCraig Hatler don't forget The Boot, which for me sums up increasing socioeconomic inequality in a really accessible way.
Marshall Burns "it is up to all of us to become his moral superior." -- the humanism of Pratchett is a nutshell.
::shrug:: I guess. I've only read Guards! Guards! and Night Watch . I've watched Hogfather , Soul Music, The Color of Magic and Going Postal.
ReplyDeleteI'll add my own, from Going Postal: There is always a choice.
ReplyDeleteThey did an adaptation of Going Postal? That's actually my very favorite book of the series, I should try to track that down.
ReplyDeleteCraig Hatler Vimes Boot is a thing Sam realizes late in his career. More full, the name is Sam Vimes's Boot Theory of Socioeconomic inequality.
ReplyDeleteA copper on the streets may buy a pair of cardboard shoes for 10 dollars. And they are kind of OK for a season or two, though they let in all the rain. And he's got to buy them again next year when they fall apart.
Meanwhile, the Duke of Ankh can buy a pair of shoes for $50 that last ten years, and are made of leather. They never let in the rain. And they'll last ten years, easy.
Over ten years, the guardsman has spent $100 and still has wet feet.
Possibly the least fortunate of the "other" riders of the apocalypse from Good Omens. They couldn't quite settle on names...
ReplyDeleteAha. That does work quite nicely. Sam always had a knack for getting to the quick of things.
ReplyDelete"There is a knocking without!" - "Without what?" - "Without the door!" - "How can there be a knocking without the door?" (quoted from memory, not sure what discworld novel it was. it was one of the witch stories.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, the concept of narrativium.
And I remember "holey socks" from the third (?) book of nome, socks from a descendant of Arnold Bros. (For context, I read the nome trilogy in my teens, when I had only been learning English for a couple of years, and every pun I understood was a win.)
"Never try to milk a chicken. It hardly ever works." Where's My Cow?
ReplyDelete"Is that my cow? It goes honk honk. That's not my cow!"
ReplyDeleteSorry. It goes Hiss not honk. It is a goose, that is not my cow. (I have that bloody thing memorized.)
ReplyDeleteWhile I have read it only as Sam Vimes's reads it in the novels.
ReplyDelete... did you read it to your kids, Misha B ?
ReplyDeleteNo, just for chuckles and grins >.>
ReplyDeleteI actually had my copy of it signed while I was pregnant with Nora. We read it to them near daily for a while, sometimes twice.
Nice.
ReplyDeleteOh, other things: Carrot: There's a difference between personal and important.
Vimes, fighting through demons and werewolves, to get back home so he can read Where's My Cow. Because he said he'd be there every night.
“Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery.”
ReplyDeleteVivian Spartacus And the invisible hat from Granny Weatherwax. and Tiffany Aching realizing that the Witching Contest isn't important, but looking eyes with Granny is.
ReplyDelete90% of what DEATH says, I have a favorite but my memory isn't allowing me to pull it up.
ReplyDeleteOhohoh, his conversation with Susan about belief from Hogfather, about believing the little lies so that we can have faith in the big ones like Justice, etc.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite Death quote is: YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE.
ReplyDeleteThis quote?
ReplyDelete“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
http://9gag.com/gag/aDwMMBN/its-a-sword-its-not-meant-to-be-safe
ReplyDeleteYes, all of that! I also like the one where he says that cats are good. :)
ReplyDeleteI wish I could find mine. I used to have it on like all of my social media profiles! It was something that really captured my attitude towards life, death, and the afterlife.
I adore that quote.
ReplyDeleteIt points out that even if higher order notions don't exist, what matters is how believing in them affects us. That we are better -- where the rising ape meets the falling angels -- because we believe in the big lies.
That's fantastic. I get goose bumps, even now.
Yep. I often wish I had the time, energy, and focus to read more Discworld in part because Susan is awesome and because honestly, Death's philosophical statements ring deeply true to me so much of the time.
ReplyDeleteVivian Spartacus Mustrum Ridcully is my very favorite Discworld character and the best wizard ever in a book.
ReplyDeleteTell us why, Marshall Burns . And maye Vivian Spartacus , too.
ReplyDeleteDEATH is my favorite, too. I still chuckle when I think of the time a guy was pouring out gasoline in his shop to burn it down for in-sewer-ants, and someone hands him a match.
ReplyDelete"Thanks," he says.
YOU'RE WELCOME
I like Ridcully (although Vimes is my favorite character in the books) because he gets things done. He's the antidote to the mysterious, powerful-but-never-uses-his-power, bearded mentors of other books. He would have flown on a giant eagle and just dropped the ring into the volcano already. He would have booted Tom Riddle out of school so fast his head would have spun.
ReplyDelete"Yea, the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One"
ReplyDelete"Psst!"
I'll always remember that line. I found Good Omens under a bench in front of a grocery store. I left it there, and came back a few hours later, and saw it still sitting there, so I took it. It was my first exposure to Pratchett.
Ridcully just so precisely matches my idea of what a wizard should be like. He's serious and shrewd and pragmatic in all the right ways, and then obtuse and ridiculous in all the right ways too.
ReplyDeleteFrom Reaper Man:
"...it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place."
From Lords and Ladies:
"‘I’m the head wizard now. I’ve only got to give an order and a thousand wizards will … uh disobey, come to think of it, or say “What?”, or start to argue. But they have to take notice.’"
From Soul Music:
"The Archchancellor polished his staff as he walked along. It was a particularly good one, six feet long and quite magical. Not that he used magic very much. In his experience, anything that couldn’t be disposed of with a couple of whacks from six feet of oak was probably immune to magic as well."
From Interesting Times:
"'Oh no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things we don’t understand.’
" ‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.' "
From Hogfather:
"'That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?' "
From The Last Continent:
"The worst thing about losing your temper with Mustrum Ridcully was that he never noticed when you did."
From Unseen Academicals:
" '… you know how it is with boundaries,' Ridcully mumbled. 'You look at what's on the other side and you realize why there was a boundary in the first place.' "
There's another really good quote that I can't seem to find that was about how the purpose of the university wasn't to learn how to magic, but rather to learn how to not magic. Because we're all better off when wizards aren't doing magic.
I think I see a Pratchett marathon in my future. I should go find my waterlogged-twice-its-original-thickness copy of "Good Omens" that I've had since I was a Private...
ReplyDeleteMarshall Burns. That last one is a Vines line, I believe, about why he liked Ridcully :)
ReplyDeleteLance Allen Do it. And your local library probably has a dozen of his books, too.
ReplyDeleteVivian Spartacus I think you are right. Vimes and Ridcully, the pragmatists.
Marshall Burns I adore the idea that leadership should be slow to understand ideas. That pushes towards staying the same, which is maybe a good thing.
ReplyDeleteI'd say it pushes against change for the sake of change; Change only when it's important.
ReplyDelete"Granny Weatherwax never needed to find herself, because she always knew who was doing the looking."
ReplyDeleteGood Omens: the demon whose innovation to add more evil to the world was to invent dropped cellphone calls.
ReplyDelete... and who ships down software EULA's to hell, with a note "This is how you do it, boys"
ReplyDelete“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!
ReplyDeleteI have a duty!”
chills, Megan Knouff . I have chills.
ReplyDeleteAdmitting to your own weakness, and turning it into a strength? Altering your perceptions so that you will be who you want to be?
That's classic Terry, and amazing.
(This is just a follow for now. Equal Rites is getting me through a week full of quotidian crumminess. <3 )
ReplyDelete"Oook"
ReplyDeleteThanks everyone.
ReplyDelete