Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett

Big collections of books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.


Because world all twisted up and wrong, like distorted glass, only came back into focus if you looked at it through bottom of bottle.


Finding that you are dead is mitigated by also finding that there really is a you who can find you dead.


Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organized crime.


Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and suddenly you're going to live another few hours.


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.


You tell them a lie, and then when you don't need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they are progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they'll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable.


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.


Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not as stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behoves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard… But no-one said anything. The cowards, each man thought.


One of the things sometimes forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.


You think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.


Down there are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.


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