Maskerade/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille.

Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!
BEWARE!!!!!
Yrs sincerely
The Opera Ghost

Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed to even think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

He had a unique stride: it looked as though his body was being dragged forward and his legs had to flail around underneath it, landing wherever they could find room. It wasn't so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely postponed.

She'd even given herself a middle initial - X - which stood for "someone who has a cool and exciting middle initial".

"What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man."

Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows.[1]

"...my father is the Emperor of Klatch and my mother is a small tray of raspberry puddings."

Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys.

A day ago the future had looked aching and desolate, and now it looked full of surprises and terror and bad things happening to people... If she had anything to do with it anyway.

It was done far more often than the audiences ever realized -- when singers had a sore throat, or had completely dried, or had turned up so drunk they could barely stand, or, in one notorious instance many years previously, had died in the interval and subsequently sung their famous aria by means of a broom-handle stuck up their back and their jaw operated with a piece of string.

After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way.

"Well, basically there are two sorts of Opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely."

The pre-luncheon drinks were going quite well, Mr Bucket thought. Everyone was making polite conversation and absolutely no one had been killed up to the present moment.

Nanny could get a statue to cry on her shoulder and say what it really thought about pigeons.

Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harrassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room.

It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end.


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  1. Er. That is to say, they went to bed at the same time as the chickens went to bed, and got up at the same time as the cows got up. Loosely worded sayings can really cause misunderstandings.