‘What? You can’t mean… Doughnut Jimmy? He’s a horse doctor!’
'So I understand,’ said Vimes.
'But why?’
'Because many of his patients survive,’ said Vimes.
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, 'is why you fellows mainly try it here or at the office. I mean, I walk around a lot, don’t I? You could shoot me down in the street, couldn’t you?’
'What? Like some common murderer, sir?’
Vimes nodded. It was black and twisted, but the Assassins’ Guild had an honour of a sort.
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
[Angua] knew her boss. He thought war was simply another crime, like murder. He didn’t much like people with titles, and regarded being a duke as a job description rather than a lever to greatness. He had an odd sense of humour. And he had a sense for what she thought of as harbingers, those little straws in the wind that said there was a storm coming.
Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
‘Do you think there’s such a thing as a criminal mind?’
Carrot almost audibly tried to work this out.
'What … you mean like … Mr. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?’
'He’s not a criminal.’
'You have eaten one of his pies, sir?’
'I mean … yes … but … he’s just geographically divergent in the financial hemisphere.’
'Sir?’
'I mean he just disagrees with other people about the position of things. Like money. He thinks it should all be in his pocket.’
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
‘You are armigerous, Nobby.’
Nobby nodded. 'But I got a special shampoo for it, sir.’
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
‘Do you know much about your, er, antecedents?’
'That is a lie, sir. I haven’t got no antecedents, sir, no matter what you might have been tole.’
'Oh. Good. Er… you don’t actually know what “antecedents” means, do you, Nobby?’
Nobby shifted uneasily. He didn’t like being questioned by policemen, especially since he was one. 'Not in so many words, sir.’
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Despite his deep distrust of magic, he quite liked the wizards. They didn’t cause trouble. At least, they didn’t cause his kind of trouble. True, occasionally they fractured the time/space continuum or took the canoe of reality too close to the white waters of chaos, but they never broke the actual law.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
‘Corporal Nobbs is sick, sir.’
'Oh, I know that.’
'I mean off sick, sir.’
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
There was a knock at the door. It should not be possible for a knock to sound surreptitious, yet this knock achieved it. It had harmonics. They told the hindbrain: the person knocking will, if no one eventually answers, open the door anyway and sidle in, whereupon he will certainly nick any smokes that are lying around, read any correspondence that catches his eye, open a few drawers, take a nip out of such bottles of alcohol as are discovered, but stop short of major crime because he is not a criminal in the sense of making a moral decision but in the sense that a weasel is evil–it is built into his very shape. It was a knock with a lot to say for itself.
‘Come in, Nobby,’ said Vimes, wearily.
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.
He’d learned something new: the very VERY rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. […] The mansion was was full of this big, solid furniture, bought by her ancestors. It never wore out. She had whole boxes full of jewellery which just seemed to have accumulated over the centuries. Vimes had seen a wine cellar that a regiment of speleologists could get so happily drunk in that they wouldn’t mind that they’d got lost without a trace.
Lady Sybil Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms