Friday, February 04, 2011

DWQ Part 1

Part 1 of the Discworld Wedding Quotes project. This covers the first ten books of the series: The Colour of Magic; The Light Fantastic; Equal Rites; Mort; Sourcery; Wyrd Sisters; Pyramids; Guards! Guards!; Eric; Moving Pictures.

The Colour of Magic

“Hrun met her gaze. He thought about his life, to date. It suddenly seemed to him to have been full of long damp nights sleeping under the stars, desperate fights with trolls, city guards, countless bandits and evil priests and, on at least three occasions, actual demigods - and for what? Well, for quite a lot of treasure, he had to admit - but where had it all gone? Rescuing beleaguered maidens had a certain passing reward, but most of the time he'd finished up by setting them up in some city somewhere with a handsome dowry, because even the most agreeable ex-maiden became possessive and had scant sympathy for his efforts to rescue her sister sufferers.”


The Light Fantastic

“'What is it that you look for in a woman now?'
Cohen turned one rheumy blue eye on him.
'Patience,' he said.”

“'This is, uh, serious?' he said. 'You're really going to marry her?'
'Shure thing. Any objections?'
'Well, no, of course not, but - I mean, she's seventeen and you're, you're how can I put it, you're of the elderly persuasion.'
'Time I shettled down, you mean?'”

Equal Rites
I didn't find anything in Equal Rites. If you can, tell me!


Mort

“His mouth opened and shut. Mort wanted to say: thirdly, you're so beautiful, or at least very attractive, or anyway far more attractive than any other girl I've ever met, although admittedly I haven't met very many. From this it will be seen that Mort's innate honesty will never make him a poet; if Mort ever compared a girl to a summer's day, it would be followed by a short explanation of what day he had in mind and whether it was raining at the time. In the circumstances, it was just as well that he couldn't find his voice.”

“'Obviously we shouldn't get married, if only for the sake of the children.'”

“The Disc's greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents.”

“Look, how about this? Let's pretend we've had the row and I've won. See? It saves a lot of effort.”

“'To be frank, I thought you were going to marry the princess.'
Mort blushed. 'We talked about it,' he said. 'Then we thought, just because you happen to rescue a princess, you shouldn't rush into things.'
'Very wise. Too many young women leap into the arms of the first young man to wake them after a hundred years' sleep, for example.'”


Sourcery

“'They'll throw you into a seraglio!'
Conina shrugged. 'Could be worse.'
'But it's got all these spikes and when they shut the door--' hazarded Rincewind.
'That's not a seraglio. That's an Iron Maiden. Don't you know what a seraglio is?'
'Um...'
She told him. He went crimson.”

“The world had suddenly separated into two parts - the bit which contained Nijel and Conina, and the bit which contained everything else. The air between them crackled. Probably, in their half, a distant orchestra was playing, bluebirds were tweeting, little pink clouds were barrelling through the sky, and all the other things that happen at times like this. When that sort of thing is going on, mere collapsing palaces in the next world don't stand a chance.”


Wyrd Sisters

“The best you could say for Magrat was that she was decently plain and well-scrubbed and as flat-chested as an ironing board with a couple of peas on it.”

“The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren't so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool's libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.”

A nervous Magrat has spent a couple of hours trying to improve her appearance...
“In a certain light and from a carefully chosen angle, Magrat was not unattractive. Whether any of these preparations did anything for her is debatable, but they did mean that a thin veneer of confidence overlaid her trembling heart.”


Pyramids

“He glanced down involuntarily and saw that every toenail was painted. He remembered Cheesewright telling them behind the stables one lunch-hour that girls who painted their toenails were... well, he couldn't quite remember now, but it had been pretty unbelievable at the time.”

“Deep in the duffel coat of his mind he hoped to one day find a nice girl who would understand the absolute importance of getting every detail right on a ceremonial six-wheeled ox-cart, and who would hold his glue-pot, and always be ready with a willing thumb whenever anything needed firm pressure until the paste dried.”

“'There you are, then. I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire.' Screams, flames, people running for safety...”


Guards! Guards!

“'It's not that they don't like you, you're a steady lad and a fine worker, you'd make a good son-in-law. Four good sons-in-law. That's the trouble. And she's only sixty, anyway. It's not proper. It's not right.'”

“Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs Colon worked all day and Sergeant Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. He got her tea ready before he left at night, she left his breakfast nice and hot in the oven in the mornings. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.”

“This morning I went for a walk with Reet and showed her many interesting examples of the ironwork to be found in the city. She said it was very interesting. She said I was quite different to anyone she's ever met.”

“And then it struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn't do worse, but then, he couldn't do better. So maybe it balanced out. She wasn't getting any younger, but then, who was? And she had style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things he didn't, and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.
And eventually, under siege, you did what Ankh-Morpork had always done - unbar the gates, let the conquerors in, and make them your own.”


Eric

Eric wants to meet the Discworld equivalent of Helen of Troy. Rincewind objects...
“'Listen,' he said. 'We're in the middle of the most famously fatuous war there has ever been, any minute now thousands of warriors will be locked in mortal combat, and you want me to go and find this over-rated female and say, my friend wants to know if you'll go out with him. Well, I won't.'”


Moving Pictures

“'You know, this place looks familiar,' he said. 'We did our first click here. It's where I first met her.'
'Very romantic,' said Gaspode distantly, hurrying away with Laddie bounding happily around him. 'If something 'orrible comes out of that door, you can fink of it as Our Monster.'”

“'The boy isn't doing anything.'
'He's useless,' said the mouse.
'He's in love,' said Gaspode. 'It's very tricky.'
'Yeah, I know how it ish,' said the cat sympathetically. 'People throwing old boots and things at you.'
'Old boots?' said the mouse.
'That'sh what's always happened to me when I've been in love.'”

“She don't know what she wants. I do what she want, then she say, that not right, you a troll with no finer feelin', you do not understand what a girl wants. She say, Girl want sticky things to eat in a box with bow around, I make box with bow around, she open box, she scream, she say flayed horse not what she mean. She don't know what she wants.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for this!