#
#
#
-%title Lords and Ladies (1)
+%title Lords and Ladies (12)
+# p. 122 (Harper Torch edition)
%passage 1
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
+
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake,
and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have
changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
+
Elves are bad.
[Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
%e passage
+# p. 32
+%passage 2
+"Hope she does all right as queen," said Nanny.
+
+"We taught her everything she knows," said Granny Weatherwax.
+
+"Yeah," said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. "D'you
+think... maybe... ?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"D'you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything /we/ know?"
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 36
+%passage 3
+It was very hard, being a reader in Invisible Writings.(1)
+
+(1) The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by
+the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic
+mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books,
+everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire
+other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past.
+But the General Theory(2) of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the
+contents of books /as yet unwritten/ can be deduced from books now in
+existence.
+
+(2) There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much
+because it's self-evidently a load of marsh gas.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 51
+%passage 4
+"Don't hold with schools," said Granny Weatherwax. "They get in the way
+of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There's too
+much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young, I
+know that."
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# pp. 79-80
+%passage 5
+The highwayman stepped over the groaning body of the driver and marched
+toward the door of the coach, dragging his stepladder behind him.
+
+He opened the door.
+
+"Your money or, I'm sorry to say, your--"
+
+A blast of octarine fire blew his hat off.
+
+The dwarf's expression did not change.
+
+"I wonder if I might be allowed to rephrase my demands?"
+
+Ridcully looked the elegantly dressed stranger up and down, or rather
+down and further down.
+
+"You don't look like a dwarf," he said, "apart from the height, that is."
+
+"Don't look like a dwarf apart from the height?"
+
+I mean, the helmet and iron boots department is among those you are lacking
+in," said Ridcully.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 95
+%passage 6
+What is magic?
+
+There is the wizards' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on
+the age of the wizard. Older wizards talk about candles, circles, planets,
+stars, bananas, chants, runes, and the importance of having at least four
+good meals every day. Younger wizards, particularly the pale ones who
+spend most of their time in the High Energy Magic building,(1) chatter at
+length about fluxes in the morphic nature of the universe, the essentially
+impermanent quality of even the most apparently rigid time-space framework,
+the impossibility of reality, and so on: what this means is that they have
+got hold of something hot and are gabbling the physics as they go along.
+
+(1) It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest
+possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to made up of
+/resons/(2) or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each
+reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five "flavors,"
+known as "up," "down," "sideways," "sex appeal," and "peppermint."
+
+(2) Lit: "Thing-ies."
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 107
+%passage 7
+What is magic?
+
+Then there is the witches' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending
+on the age of the witch. Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but
+may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn't know what the
+hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities,
+and could become any of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty
+was inserted in the crack and /twisted/; that, if you really had to make
+someone's hat explode, all you needed to do was /twist/ into the universe
+where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce
+off in different directions.
+
+Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe
+it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers
+on.
+
+Everyone may to right, all at the same time. That's the thing about
+quantum.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 114; 'colorful' & 'humor' are spelled the American way, 'or' not 'our'
+%passage 8
+He knocked on the coach door. The window slid down.
+
+"I wouldn't like you to think of this as a robbery," he said. "I'd like
+you to think of it more as a colorful anecdote you might enjoy telling your
+grandchildren about."
+
+A voice from within said, "That's him! He stole my horse!"
+
+A wizard's staff poked out. The chieftain saw the knob on the end.
+
+"Now then," he said pleasantly. "I know the rules. Wizards aren't allowed
+to use magic against civilians except in genuine life-threatening situa--"
+
+There was a burst of octarine light.
+
+"Actually, it's not a rule," said Ridcully. "It's more a guideline." He
+turned to Ponder Stibbons. "Interestin' use of Stacklady's Morphic
+Resonator here, I hoped you noticed."
+
+Ponder lookd down.
+
+The chieftain had been turned into a pumpkin, although, in accordance with
+the rules of universal humor, he still had his hat on.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 149 (second half of a paragraph)
+%passage 9
+Things had to balance. You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad
+witch. It never worked for long. All you could try to be was a /witch/,
+as hard as you could.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 162 (mid-paragraph)
+%passage 10
+"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.
+
+"I've been to that University a few times," said Granny. "A bunch of fat
+old men in beards."
+
+"That's right! That's /them/!"
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 190
+%passage 11
+The window was no escape this time. There was the bed to hide under, and
+that'd work for all of two seconds, wouldn't it?
+
+Her eye was drawn by some kind of horrible magic back to the room's
+garderobe, lurking behind its curtain.
+
+Margrat lifted the lid. The shaft was definitely wide enough to admit a
+body. Garderobes were notorious in that respect. Several unpopular kings
+met their end, as it were, in the garderobe, at the hands of an assassin
+with good climbing ability, a spear, and a fundamental approach to politics.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
+# p. 191 ('a' historian, not 'an'; 'Ynci' is correct)
+%passage 12
+Some shape, some trick of moonlight, some expression on a painted face
+somehow cut through her terror and caught her eye.
+
+That was a portrait she'd never seen before. She'd never walked down this
+far. The idiot vapidity of the assembled queens had depressed her. But
+this one...
+
+Ths one, somehow, reached out to her.
+
+She stopped.
+
+It couldn't have been done from life. In the days of /this/ queen, the
+only paint known locally was a sort of blue, and generally used on the body.
+But a few generations ago King Lully I had been a bit of a historian and a
+romantic. He'd researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and
+where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions
+of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom(1)
+and extrapolated from associated sources(2). He'd commissioned the
+portrait of Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered, one of the founders of the
+kingdom.
+
+(1) Made it up.
+
+(2) Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
+
+ [Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett]
+%e passage
%e title
#
#
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