Home > Work > Raising Steam (Discworld, #40, Moist von Lipwig #3)
1 " Measurements is your saving grace if you want to raise steam. "
― Terry Pratchett , Raising Steam (Discworld, #40, Moist von Lipwig #3)
2 " Anger was a weapon to be honed and treasured and used only at the moment yielding most premium. "
3 " Looking out the window, Moist saw a small swarm of goblins leave the train and at first he thought, ha! Trust the buggers to run away, and then he mentally corrected himself: that was storybook thinking and with clearer eyesight and a bit of understanding he realized that the goblins were scrambling up to the delvers on the rocks and beating the shit out of them by diving into the multiple layers of dwarf clothing. The delvers discovered all too rapidly that trying to fight while a busy goblin was in your underwear was very bad for the concentration. "
4 " In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don't really care. "
5 " That's the trouble, you see. When you've had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don't know how to spit it out. "
6 " The commander went, as they say in Ankh-Morpork, totally Librarian on them. "
7 " Moist waited. Lord Vetinari could outstare a statue and make even a statue start to feel nervous and confess. Moist's counter was a fetching grin, which he knew annoyed Vetinari beyond measure, and there was absolute silence in the Oblong Office while blank stare and cheery grin battled it out for supremacy in some other dimension. "
8 " The aristocrats, if such they could be called, generally hated the whole concept of the train on the basis that it would encourage the lower classes to move about and not always be available. "
9 " Bandits and governments 'ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world... "
10 " The grags came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing. "
11 " Moist groaned. It was the crack of seven and he was allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day. "
12 " Mister Lipwig, the world lives between those who say it cannot be done and those who say that it can. And in my experience, those who say that it can be done are usually telling the truth. It's just a matter of thinking creatively. "
13 " I see embarrassment among all of you. That's good. The thing about being embarrassed is that sooner or later you aren't, but you remember that you were. "
14 " Everything is magic when you don’t know what it is. Your sliding rule is a magic wand to most people. "
15 " Everybody present laughed nervously, except Lord Vetinari, who just laughed. "
16 " ...the world kept turning and the Turtle moved. "
17 " people went looking to find themselves and what they found was somebody else. "
18 " Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats. "
19 " Vetinari gave him a look that did not actually employ a raised eyebrow but which implied that one might be forthcoming if the recipient of the look pushed his luck. "
20 " And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler? "
