User Profile

But those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and in any case were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Lords come and go, but dust accumulates.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 294)

All it had was the unimportant stuff. It had the entire slaughterhouse district, and the butter market, and the cheese market. It had the tobacco factors and the candlemakers and most of the fruit and vegetable warehouses and the grain and flour stores. This meant that while the Republicans were being starved of important things like government, banking services and salvation, they were self-sufficient in terms of humdrum, everyday things like food and drink. People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 274)

‘Tell us about this man Keel,’ said the major. ‘I don’t know nuffin’,’ said Nobby automatically. ‘Aha, that means you do know something,’ said the major, who was indeed the sort of person who liked this kind of little triumph. Nobby looked blank. The captain leaned forward to whisper to his superior officer. ‘Er, only under the rules of mathematics, sir,’ he said. ‘Under the rules of common grammar, he is merely being emphat—’ ‘Tell us about Keel!’ the major shouted.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 264)

‘You took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favour,’ said Vimes. ‘And to protect the innocent. That’s all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You’re an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.’

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 218)

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 207)

They attacked the other Houses, and what’s the Night Watch ever done to hurt them?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Vimes. ‘There you are, then.’ ‘I mean the Watch did nothing, and that’s what hurt them,’ said Vimes.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 192)

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 162)

‘The riot was over the price of bread, I understand.’ No. The protest was over the price of bread, said Vimes’s inner voice. The riot was what happens when you have panicking people trapped between idiots on horseback and other idiots shouting ‘yeah, right!’ and trying to push forward, and the whole thing in the charge of a fool advised by a maniac with a steel rule.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 149)

That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 135)

Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn’t look around, and watch and learn, and then say, ‘This is how people are, how do we deal with it?’ No, he sat and thought: ‘This is how the people ought to be, how do we change them?’ And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper, because Swing’s patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 112)

Like petty criminals everywhere, the watchmen prided themselves that there were some depths to which they would not sink. There had to be some things below you, even if it was only mudworms.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 104)

‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘it’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 73)

The garden didn’t get much proper light. Gardens like this never did. You got second-hand light once the richer folk in the taller buildings had finished with it.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 64)

‘Shirts so worn you could see daylight through ’em and trousers as shiny as glass,’ said Vimes. ‘And by the end of the week half the stuff was in the pawn shop.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Sweeper. ‘You’d pawn your clothes in the pawn shop, but you’d never buy clothes from the pawn shop, ’cos there were Standards, right?’ Vimes nodded. When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder the rungs were very close together

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 63)

Privilege, which just means private law. Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.

— Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) by Terry Pratchett (Page 46)