#
#
#
-%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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