Masters of the Unsaid Words

Sometimes the only way to make sure you do something is to write it all down. Or, I try to read something every day

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- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

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Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

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Nothing much had happened for some while after his visit with the oxen except that, very slowly, their eyes had begun to cross and them, also quite slowly, turn red. It takes a long time for anything to happen inside the head of an ox, but, when it does, it happens extensively.   The moo started off low and rose slowly. It was a visceral sound that had rolled across ancient tundra and told early man that here came dinner or death, and either way it was pissed

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

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The world was spinning. Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?     Coppers like to say that people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, and they thought the knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out their neighbour with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn’t be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?   What was supposed to happen next? Oh yes, he had a badge, but it wasn’t his, not really…and he’d got orders, and they were the wrong ones…and he’d got enemies, for all the wrong reasons…and maybe there was no future. It didn’t exist anymore. There was nothing real, no solid point on which to stand, just Sam Vimes where he had no right to be…   It was as if his body, trying to devote as many resources as possible to untangling the spinning thoughts, was drawing those resources from the rest of Vimes. His vision darkened. His knees felt weak.   There was nothing but bewildered despair.   And a lot of explosions.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

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Kip had been a very young man once.   That young fool had died in the fires of his wife's wrath when he tried to deny her something. Specifically, he'd tried to forbid her from coming along to fight.   'You don't fight,' he'd said, quite sensibly, he'd thought.   'I don't want to fight.'   That flashbulb of scintillating non-sequitur had left him momentarily dazed. She'd thrown her things aboard the skimmer, along with another woman Kip did not recognise.   'But...we're going in order to fight. We are going so that we can fight. We're going with the sole intention of fighting. Ergo, if one does not want to fight, where we - the Mighty - are going, is not where you, who are not the Mighty, should go.'   That seemed to set a kettle of rage boiling. So he kept talking.   He'd been a young man.   'You see,' he said. 'If I were not going specifically to fight, I would probably choose someplace safer than, you know, the middle of a battle. And since your place–'   'My place? My place?!' And a more rapid boil than Kip had expected. Here he'd kept his eye on the pot the whole time and everything. 'First things first, Lord Guile! I am too part of the Mighty. I'm one of you now, and don't you dare take that away from me.'   'The Mighty obey my orders. I'm their–'   'You do not give orders to your wife!'   'If they're in the Mighty I do!'   He knew he shouldn't have said that.   He'd said it. He'd been young.   Things had gone downhill from there.

Brent Weeks, The Blood Mirror

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When a human doctor, after much bleeding and cupping, finds that a patient has died out of sheer desperation, he can always say, "Dear me, will of the gods, that will be thirty dollars please," and walk away a free man, This is because human beings are not, technically, worth anything. A good racehorse, on the other hand, may be worth twenty thousand dollars. A doctor who lets one hurry off too soon to that great big paddock in the sky may well expect to hear, out of some dark alley, a voice saying something along the lines of "Mr. Chrysoprase is very upset," and find the brief remainder of his life full of incident

Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

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Think'st thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs: mine Have made my days and nights imperishable, Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore, Innumerable atoms, and one desert, Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break, But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks, Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness.

Lord Byron, Manfred

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[…] - Beautiful! How beautiful is all this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself; But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we, Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mix’d essence make A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation and of pride, Contending with low wants and lofty will Till our mortality predominates, And men are - what they name not to themselves, And trust not to each other. […]

Lord Byron, Manfred

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They…mess people around. They think that just because they’re right that’s the same as good!

Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

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There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember that really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now you realise you’re going to have to look a lot of people in the eye and you’re sober now and so are they but you can both remember..

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

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Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species Moreau fibre and, in some cases, backbone. This is probably fine from the species' point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig, or at least a small pink root-eating reptile that might one day evolve into a real pig.

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

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Poor, girl? I fail to understand the point of that remark. I think myself a very fortunate girl, I assure you. I'm thoroughly happy, and having a splendid time. Pray don't waste time mourning over me. There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

E.M. Forster A Room with A View

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We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in the word sorrow.

E.M. Forster, A Room with A View

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The problem with space travel, says Graham, is that space is too big. It's one thing to design a spaceship, but then it takes aeons to get anywhere in it. The stars are too far away. So Graham is working on a device to shrink the galaxy.    Instead of reaching out to the stars, Graham will have the stars reach down to us.

Rosaleen Love, Alexia and Graham Bell

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- Mike Mignola and John Byrne, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

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- Mike Mignola and John Byrne, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

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- Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga: Volume 1