Guards! Guards! quotes page 2
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He’d had a look at Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler’s dragon detectors, which consisted solely of a piece of wood on a metal stick. When the stick was burned through, you’d found your dragon. Like a lot of Cut-me-own-Throat’s devices, it was completely efficient in its own special way while at the same time being totally useless.



Traditionally, upon waking from blissfully uneventful insensibility, you ask: ‘Where am I?’ It’s probably part of the racial consciousness or something.



‘Anyway, we found we’ve got a lot in common. It’s an amazing coincidence, but my grandfather once had his grandfather whipped for malicious lingering.’



Going Up in the World is a metaphor, which I am learning about, it is like Lying but more decorative.



Its eyes were the size of very large eyes.



They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt.



‘And now they get one sniff of an ermine robe and they go all gooey,’ [Vimes] muttered.

[Just as in foc with Colon's comment, I feel like this ought to continue the running joke in the series and be ‘vermine’, not ‘ermine’.]



Various domesticated animals were being roasted in the streets. Dancers conga’d from house to house, often managing to pick up any loose ornaments while doing so[…]. People who in normal circumstances would never think of doing it were shouting ‘Hurrah’.



[Vimes] wasn’t feeling at all royalist. He didn’t think he had anything against kings as such [...].

[It must be the events of this book that cause him to put them up on the top of the list of things he hates in later books.]



He [the king] looked personable enough, not exactly a great thinker, but definitely the sort of face you wouldn’t mind seeing on your spare change.



Lord Vetinari seldom had balls. There was a popular song about it, in fact.



The third attempt went upwards, forming an actinic column that eventually rose fifty or sixty feet in the air, appeared to stabilize, and stared to spin slowly.
Vimes felt a comment was called for. He said: ‘Arrgh.’



Vimes’s legs gave in at that point and decided that they might allow themselves to be heroic legs for once.



‘Are the Cups of Integrity well and truly suffused?’ intoned Brother Watchtower.
‘Aye, suffused full well.’
‘The Waters of the World, are they Abjured?’
‘Yea, abjured full mightily.’
‘Have the Demons of Infinity been bound with many chains?’
‘Damn,’ said Brother Plasterer, ‘there’s always something.’



‘Might just have been 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.



Normally the only decoration in there was on Sham Harga’s vest and the food was all good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone.

[Note this pre-Moving Pictures appearance for Sham Harga - he wasn't just made up so that Detritus can say ‘play it again, Sham’ in that book!]



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.



[The Master of the Fellowship of Beggars] wrapped his velvet cloak around him.
‘You couldn’t by any chance spare -’ he paused, calculating a sum in accordance with his station – ‘about three hundred dollars for a twelve-course civic banquet, could you?’



By the small portable sacrificial altar a tethered billy goat was peacefully chewing the cud and possibly thinking, in Goat: What a lucky billy goat I am, to be given such a good view of the proceedings. This is going to be something to tell the kids.



In the damp silence that followed Sergeant Colon looked down at the stone he was sitting on. It had a taper, and a scaly pattern, and a sort of indefinable tail-like quality.



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



The assassin shivered. Why him? As far as he could see there was only one kind of help he was qualified to give, and very few people ever asked for it for themselves. In fact, they usually paid large sums for it to be given as a surprise present to other people.



‘A dwarf can go hundreds of miles with a cake like this in his pack,’ Carrot went on.
‘I bet he can,’ said Colon gloomily, ‘I bet all the time he’d be thinking, “Bloody hell, I hope I can find something else to eat soon, otherwise it’s the bloody cake again.” ’
Carrot, to whom the word irony meant something to do with metal, picked up his pike.



‘What’s a virgin?’ [Carrot] said.
‘An unmarried girl,’ said Colon quickly.
‘What, like my friend Reet?’ said Carrot, horrified.
‘Well, no,’ said Colon.



‘I don’t want to be burned alive,’ said Sergeant Colon. ‘My wife’d give me hell.’



‘He wants to challenge the big dragon. Every time it takes to the air he just sits there whining.’
‘And doesn’t explode?’
‘Not that we’ve noticed.’



‘The Duke of Sto Helit is looking for a guard captain, I’m sure.’

[The Duke of Sto Helit is Mort.]



‘I don’t care!’ he shouted, his voice echoing from wall to wall in the silence. ‘We defy you! If you kill me, you might as well kill all of us!’
There was some uneasy shuffling of feet amongst those sections of the crowd who didn’t feel that this was absolutely axiomatic.



Colon didn’t reply. I wish Captain Vimes were here, he thought. He wouldn’t have known what to do either, but he’s got a much better vocabulary to be baffled in.



Sergeant Colon cleared his throat. Then he straightened the hang of his breastplate. It was one of those with astonishingly impressive pectoral muscles embossed upon it. His chest and stomach fitted into it in the same way that jelly fits into a mould.



The thing to do with gloaters was to play the game according to the rules.
‘You’ll never get away with it,’ he said.



Thick though the palace guard were, they were as aware as everyone else of the conventions, and when guards are summoned to deal with one man in overheated circumstances it’s not a good time for them. The bugger’s bound to be heroic, he was thinking. This guard was not looking forward to a future in which he was dead.



There were, he told himself, far worse things than Lady Ramkin although, admittedly, they weren’t three inches from his nose at this point in time.



‘The king is hardly going to wasn’t other dragons dead, is he? They’re probably distant relatives of something. 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.’



It must be something about high office. The altitude sends people mad.



‘I mean, it’s a good job we’ve got a last desperate million-to-one chance to rely on, or we’d really be in trouble!’



‘I’m not bloody well going to have it, understand?’ Vimes shouted, shaking the ape back and forth.
‘Oook,’ the Librarian pointed out, patiently.
‘What? Oh. Sorry.’ Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn’t make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300lbs of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.



Nobby put his head on one side.
‘It looks promising,’ he said critically. ‘We might be nearly there. I reckon the chances of a man with soot on his face, his tongue sticking out, standing on one leg and singing The Hedgehog Song ever hitting a dragon’s voonerables would be… what’d you say, Carrot?’
‘A million to one, I reckon,’ said Carrot virtuously.
Colon glared at them.
‘Listen, lads,’ he said, ‘you’re not winding me up, are you?’



Carrot looked down at the plaza below them.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he said softly.

[This is strong language for a man who has trouble with ‘d*mn’ in foc!]



‘At last they’ve bred one who’s sensible,’ said Vimes morosely. ‘Let’s be honest: the chances of a dragon the size of Errol beating something that big are a million-to-one.’
There was one of those silences you get after one clear bright note has been struck and the world pauses.
The rank looked at one another.
‘Million-to-one?’ asked Carrot nonchalantly.
‘Definitely,’ said Vimes. ‘Million-to-one.’
The rank looked at one another again.
‘Million-to-one,’ said Colon.
‘Million-to-one,’ agreed Nobby.
‘That’s right,’ said Carrot. ‘Million-to-one.’
There was another high-toned silence. The members of the rank were wondering who was going to be the first to say it.
Sergeant Colon took a deep breath.
‘But it might just work,’ he said.



Sergeant Colon drew his bow and squared his shoulders. ‘You heard the Man,’ he rasped. ‘One false move and you’re… you’re -’ he took a desperate stab at it – ‘you’re Home Economics!’



The Laws and Ordinances of Ankh and Morpork caught the secretary on the forehead. He blinked, staggered, and stepped backwards.
It was the longest step he ever took. For one thing, it lasted the rest of his life.
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