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a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
“I was never very good with words, you know,” said Champot. “I always found it easier to hit people with something.
“Though the thing with crowns is, it isn’t the putting them on that’s the problem, it’s the taking them off.”
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.
“See?” she said to the world in general in a strangely satisfied voice. “Nothing’s real! It’s all just paint, and sticks and paper at the back.”
“Let him be whoever he thinks he is,” she said. “That’s all anybody could hope for in this world.”
“People don’t go and find witchcraft, it comes and finds them.”
“Well, being assassinated is natural causes for a king,” said Granny.
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
“Never trust a man with horns on his hat,” said Granny flatly.
“It’s all these books they read today,” said Granny. “It overheats the brain.
Once you’ve lost your respect, you ain’t got a thing.
If you could conjure demons out of washtubs, you could do anything.
She had been deep in conversation with the Fool, although it was the kind of conversation where both parties spend a lot of time looking at their feet and picking at their fingernails. Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.
“But when you get along in the Craft, you learn that the hardest magic is the sort you don’t use at all.”
“When you break rules, break ’em good and hard,” said Nanny, and grinned a set of gums that were more menacing than teeth.
Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.
I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.”
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
Destiny gets it wrong half the time.”
Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.
“Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system,” said Magrat. “If you could see inside your colon you’d be horrified.” “I think I would,” muttered Hwel.
The theater worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.
Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from—hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.
Gold does not tarnish, at least physically, but Tomjon felt that the thin band of metal in his hands had an unpleasant depth to its luster. It had sat on too many troubled heads. If you held it to your ear, you could hear the screams.
