He bounced a little, like a man testing the hardness of something. 'Elm Street,' he said. He bounced again. 'Junction with Twinkle. Yeah.' He was back.
You're not me, he thought. I don't think I was ever as young as you. If you're going to be me, it's going to take a lot of work. Thirty damn years of being hammered on the anvil of life, you poor bastard. You've got it all to come.
couldn't warn people, either. You didn't know what could change the future, but if he understood things right, history tended to spring back into shape. All you could change was the bits around the edges, the fine details. There was nothing he could do about the big stuff.
He wondered if it was at all possible to give this idiot some lessons in basic politics. 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.
In a world where we all move in curves he proceeds in a straight line. And going straight in a world of curves makes things happen.'
'Look, I haven't got time for this,' said Vimes. 'Where's the back door? This is Watch business!' 'I pay! I pay protection! One month, no trouble!' Vimes grunted and set off along another narrow, cloth-lined tunnel. A glint of glass caught his eye, and he sidled crabwise up a choked aisle until he found a counter. It was piled with more hopeless merchandise, but there was a bead-curtained doorway behind it. He half clambered, half swam over the piles and scrambled into the tiny room
It's bloody Rust this time round! And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the gods' gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion. The Rust family
They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to.
1 Supposing the area behind the barricades was bigger than the area in front of the barricades, right? 2 Like, sort of, it had more people in it and more of the city, if you follow me. 3 Then,
People who'd never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent their life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed . . . . . . and gave back the dung from its pens and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions and ideas and interesting vices, songs and knowledge and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That's what civilization meant. It meant the city.
If they had been in a position to put a red spot on the heads of those people who were not friends of the Patrician, and a white spot on those who were his cronies, and a pink spot on those who were perennial waverers, then they would have seen something like a dance taking place.
Lords come and go, but dust accumulates.
And that was Carcer. No hard feelings. His best shot. Can't blame a man for trying.