More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They thought you could see life through books but you couldn’t, the reason being that the words got in the way.
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all the time and handed on the fight to their descendants. The chips on some shoulders had been passed down for generations. Some had antique value. A bloody good grudge, Lancre reckoned, was like a fine old wine. You looked after it carefully and left it to your children.
The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches they gave you a bigger shovel.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple-corer.
‘I remember when you told me to put my cat out of its misery,’ said Lacrimosa. ‘I really meant you to stop what you were doing to it,’ said the Count.
She didn’t like birds, in any case. They were fine when they were flying, and their songs were nice, but close to they were mad little balls of needles with the intelligence of a housefly.
books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the world.
She was not, herself, hugely in favour of motherhood in general. Obviously it was necessary, but it wasn’t exactly difficult. Even cats managed it. But women acted as if they’d been given a medal that entitled them to boss people around. It was as if, just because they’d got the label which said ‘mother’, everyone else got a tiny part of the label that said ‘child’ …
Agnes loathed him. Perdita merely hated him, which is the opposite pole to love and just as attractive.
‘They never burned witches,’ said Granny. ‘Probably they burned some old ladies who spoke up or couldn’t run away. I wouldn’t look for witches bein’ burned,’ she added, shifting position. ‘I might look for witches doin’ the burning, though. We ain’t all nice.’
‘There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that—’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.’
You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people any more, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just … is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbours.’
