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Quotes, from Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
"But what was happening now... this was magical. Ordinary men had dreamed it up and put it together, building towers on rafts in swamps and across the frozen spines of mountains. They'd cursed, and worse, used logarithms. They'd waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry. They hadn't dreamed, in the way people usually used the word, but they'd imagined a different world, and bent metal around it. And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this... thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight."
'It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. Oh, yes. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although "synergistically" had probably been a whore from the start. The Grand Trunk's problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management made mistakes--oops, "well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit f hindsight, might have been, in some respects, in error" -- but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting "fundamental systemic errors" committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and "were to be regretted.""
I wish I could fling words like that. I can feel the anger in the second, and the first is just great. I guess that's why he's sold millions of books and me none. That and I haven't finished anything.
Tags: Writing, Quotes
'It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. Oh, yes. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although "synergistically" had probably been a whore from the start. The Grand Trunk's problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management made mistakes--oops, "well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit f hindsight, might have been, in some respects, in error" -- but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting "fundamental systemic errors" committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and "were to be regretted.""
I wish I could fling words like that. I can feel the anger in the second, and the first is just great. I guess that's why he's sold millions of books and me none. That and I haven't finished anything.
Tags: Writing, Quotes
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