“If you were a dear, good little wife, Janet,’ had said Lymond, ‘you’d fall into a mortal decline that day, or at least hide his boots.’ ‘Francis Crawford, are ye daft! What ever kept a Scott from a fight? Women? Boots? If yon one were deid, he’d spend his time in Heaven sclimming up and down the Pearly Gates peppering Kerrs.”

“I’ve wed his two empty boots.’ ‘That you havena,’ said Janet, Lady of Buccleuch, lowering her voice not at all in the presence of two hundred twittering Scott relations as they gazed after their vanishing husbands. ‘They aye remember their boots. It’s their empty nightgowns that get fair monotonous.”

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

“...the only souvenir she kept of Aureliano Segundo was a pair of patent leather boots, which, according to what he himself had said, were the ones he wanted to wear in his coffin. She kept them wrapped in cloth in the bottom of a trunk and made ready to feed on memories, waiting without despair. "He has to come sooner or later," she told herself, "even if it's just to put on those boots.”

“There's no boot."No boot?"No."That makes me sad."I ate it."You ate the boot?"Yes."Was it good?"No. Were the cigarettes good?"No. I couldn't finish them."I couldn't finish the boot.”

“Did I ever tell you,’ said Lymond pausing on the afterthought, on his way to the flap, ‘that that aunt of mine once hatched an egg?’ He paused, deep in thought, and walked slowly to the door before turning again. His lordship of Aubigny, staring after the vanishing form of his brother, received the full splendour of Lymond’s smile. ‘It was a cuckoo,’ said Francis Crawford prosaically, and followed Lennox out.”