from
Guards! Guards!
by
Terry Pratchett

Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass;
a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

“To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height.”

“Demarcation, they call it,” said Brother Plasterer. “Like, I don’t go around fiddling with the mystic interleaved wossnames of causality, and they don’t do any plastering.”

Letters rarely got written in that mine. Work stopped and the whole clan had sat around in respectful silence as his pen scrittered across the parchment. [...] His sister had been sent down to the village to ask Mistress Garlick the witch how you stopped spelling recommmendation.

“Don’t we have to chant a mystic prune or something?”

“I shall deal with the matter momentarily,” he said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask.

Over the door a motto in the ancient tongue of the city was now almost eroded by time and grime and lichen, but could just be made out:

FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC

It translated – according to Sergeant Colon, who had served in foreign parts and considered himself an expert on languages – as ‘To Protect and to Serve’.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

Colon was sulking because Vimes had forbidden him to use his bow and arrow.

These weren’t encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a longbow’s arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred yards away rather than the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.

Noble dragons don’t have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.

“Might have been just an innocent bystander, sir,” said Carrot.

“What, in Ankh-Morpork?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value,” said Vimes.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

“I mean, it wouldn’t want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?”

“Well, sir, people do, sir,” said the guard sulkily.

“Ah, well,” said the captain. “That’s different.” He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. “That’s ’cos we’re intelligent.”

“Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in yourself,” said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. “The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”