No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away
With the passing of Sir Terry Pratchett and the publication of The Shepherd’s Crown, I embarked on an epic re-reading of all 41 official Discworld novels, with the goal of finishing by 31 December, 2016.
Famous for its wit and wisdom, the series offers countless quotable quotes on a variety of subjects. The quotes I share should not be considered the whole of Sir Terry’s excellent prose; indeed, they are the tasty appetizers to a succulent, nourishing meal.
About Making Money
This is the 36th Discworld novel, the 5th in the Industrial Revolution series, and the 2nd to feature Moist von Lipwig.
Moist von Lipwig is in trouble: he’s bored. The Ankh-Morpork Post Office runs efficiently, he’d about to receive a very nearly gold chain for his service to the community, and Adora is off looking for golems again. What’s a man to do but take up Extreme Sneezing?
Fortunately (?), all is not well at the Royal Mint. The late Sir Joshua Lavish and his slightly more recently late wife, Topsy, have left the controlling shares of the bank to a certain Mr. Fusspot. It’s all perfectly legal, but of course the Lavish children are rather put off over being passed over for a dog.
Assigned Mr. Fusspot’s legal guardian, Moist is now the de facto Chairman of the Board of the Royal Mint, and it’s time to make money . . . literally. Of course, something’s got to be done about that pesky gold just sitting in the vaults doing nothing.
And, when life imitates art (or art imitates life, as the case may be), things start to heat up. Throw in a past thought forgotten and a more ancient past forgotten by all but one leching ghost of a necromancer, and things are about to get a great deal more interesting for Mr. Moist von Lipwig.
Oh, and mind how you chew.
5 stars
The Goodreads Blurb:
It’s an offer you can’t refuse.
Who would not to wish to be the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Mint and the bank next door? It’s a job for life. But, as former con-man Moist von Lipwig is learning, the life is not necessarily for long.
The Chief Cashier is almost certainly a vampire. There’s something nameless in the cellar (and the cellar itself is pretty nameless), it turns out that the Royal Mint runs at a loss. A 300 year old wizard is after his girlfriend, he’s about to be exposed as a fraud, but the Assassins Guild might get him first. In fact lot of people want him dead.
Oh. And every day he has to take the Chairman for walkies.
Everywhere he looks he’s making enemies. What he should be doing is . . . Making Money!
To the Quotes!
The Librarian as he appears in The Discworld Companion, illustrated by Paul Kidby
And the gods, once they’ve got a man against the ropes, can’t resist one more thunderbolt.
Insanity is catching.
There’s more than one way of racking a man.
I know if you want to sell the sausage you have to know how to sell the sizzle.
It was impressive. And the first impression it gave Moist was: this is Hell on the day they couldn’t find the matches.
An error, sir, is worse than a sin, the reason being that a sin is often a matter of opinion or viewpoint or even of timing but an error is a fact and it cries out for correction.
Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something to keep quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
Cunning can do duty for thought, up to a point, and then you die.
[Money] doesn’t like to stand still, you know. It likes to get out and make new friends.
If you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up.
As a family, people said, the Lavishes got along like a bagful of cats.
Lavishes might sue and conspire and belittle and slander, but there was such a thing as good manners, after all.
Tell someone you were going to rob them and all that happened was that you got was a reputation as a truthful man.
He sold pies and sausages off a tray, usually to people who were worse for drink, who then became the worse for pies.
Because people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.
You could trust numbers, except perhaps for pi, but he was working on that in his spare time and it was bound to give in sooner or later.
Building a temple didn’t mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.
Igors were, in fact, smart, which is why they were always elsewhere when the fiery torches hit the windmill.
To see was to know.
Many great men have been conthidered mad, Mr. Hubert. Even Dr. Hanth Forvord wath called mad. But I put it to you: could a madman have created a revolutionary living-brain extractor?
The price of a good woman was proverbially above rubies, so a skillfully bad one was presumably worth a lot more.
Mr. Lipwig, do I need a button that says TYRANT?
If you don’t think of not using fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.
Igor gave this some thought. In his experience, a prime definition of “the wrong hands” was “the government.”
You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.
Speculation is always more interesting than facts.
. . .
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