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Book: The Fifth Elephant
Quotes of Book: The Fifth Elephant

Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
He took his hands off the oars and pulled in the mooring rope. If I make a couple of loops, he thought, I can strap the axe on to my back.He had a mental picture of what could happen to a man who plunged into the cauldron below a waterfall with a sharp piece of metal attached to his body.GOOD MORNING.Vimes blinked. A tall dark robed figure was now sitting in the boat.'Are you Death?'IT'S THE SCYTHE, ISN'T IT? PEOPLE ALWAYS NOTICE THE SCYTHE.'I'm going to die?'POSSIBLY.'Possibly? You turn up when people are possibly going to die?'OH, YES. IT'S QUITE THE NEW THING. IT'S BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.'What's that?'I'M NOT SURE.'That's very helpful."
book-quote uncertainty
Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
It was, he felt, a persistent flaw in his wife's otherwise practical and sensible character that she believed, against all evidence, that he was a man of many talents. He he had hidden depths. There was nothing in them that he'd like to see float to the surface. They contained things that should be left to lie.
book-quote sam-vimes the-beast
Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
We try to make guests feel welcome," said Dee, scuttling behind his desk. He pulled off his pointed hat and, to Vimes's amazement, put on a pair of thick smoked glasses."You had papers?" he said. Vimes handed them over."It says here "His Grace"," the dwarf said, after reading them for awhile."Yes, that's me.""And there's a sir.""That's me, too.""And an excellency.""'fraid so." Vimes narrowed his eyes. "I was blackboard monitor for awhile, too.
book-quote humourous
Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
Sam Vimes could parallel process. Most husbands can. They learn to follow their own line of thought while at the same time listening to what their wives say. And the listening is important, because at any time they could be challenged and must be ready to quote the last sentence in full. A vital additional skill is being able to scan the dialogue for telltale phrases, such as "and they can deliver it tomorrow" or "so I've invited them for dinner" or "they can do it in blue, really quite cheaply.
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Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren't the people the people who made up the phrase "people are people everywhere" had traditionally thought of as people.
book-quote humourous
Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell… And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it'd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn't explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war. "And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf," said Cheery sadly. "There's the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we're all dwarfs," she said, "but relations are strained.
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Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
It was turning out to be one of those days. The sort you got every day.
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Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
He sagged to his knees. He ached all over. It wasn't just that his brain was writing cheques that his body couldn't cash. It had gone beyond that. Now his feet were borrowing money that his legs hadn't got, and his back muscles were looking for loose change under the sofa cushions.
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Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
It is in the nature of the universe that the person who always keeps you waiting ten minutes will, on the day you are ten minutes tardy, have been ready ten minutes early and will make a point of not mentioning this.
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Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
Shut up sergeant. You're a free troll. That's an order"Sam Vimes
book-quote terry-pratchett the-fifth-elephant
Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!" But he didn't, because if he had said any of those things then he'd have known that what he had just done was murder.
book-quote murder police
Terry Pratchett _ The Fifth Elephant
No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise?
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