Carpe Jugulum (Discworld, #23; Witches, #6)

by Terry Pratchett

lending her self to the baby did have a sort of rightness to it, a folklore touch, a romantic ring, and that’s why Nanny and Magrat would probably believe it and that was why Granny wouldn’t do it.

For hundreds of years the falconers had simply got on with the important things, like falconry, which needed a lot of training, and left the kinging to amateurs.

You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right.

This wasn’t the fight she had expected.

light behind her, darkness in front . . .

was the light the way in, or the way out?

CHOOSE, he said. YOU ARE GOOD AT CHOOSING, I BELIEVE. “Is there any advice you could be givin’ me?” said Granny. CHOOSE RIGHT.

Agnes felt that beauty was even more likely to be in the eye of the beholder if the feet of the beholder were on something solid. At ten thousand feet up, the eye of the beholder tends to water.

“Mythology’s just the folktales of people who won ’cos they had bigger swords.

He’d survived quite happily in the castle for many years by knowing where his business was, and he was suddenly very clear that it wasn’t here, thank goodness.

She’d changed as soon as the others had entered. Before, she’d been bowed and tired. Now she was standing tall and haughty, supported in a scaffolding of pride.

Let the Queen do the fightin’, ’cos if you lose the King you’ve lost everything.”

“Mercy’s a fine thing, but judgin’ comes first. Otherwise you don’t know what you’re bein’ merciful about.

“There’s no grays, 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.”

When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth.

Hard to have faith, ain’t it, when you read too many books.”

“He holdth people in hith jawth and beatth them thentheleth with hith tailth.” “He wags people to death?” “Thometimeth he drownth them in dribble,”

I LOVE SCRAPS

People were good at imagining hells, and some they occupied while they were alive.

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 neighbors.”

One aspect of witchcraft is the craftiness, and it’s seldom unwise to take the credit for unexplained but fortuitous events.

There’s no point in having underlings if you don’t let them be the first to go through suspicious doors.

I ain’t been vampired. You’ve been Weatherwaxed.

“If I’ve got a fault,” she said, contriving to suggest that this was only a theoretical possibility, “it’s not knowing when to turn and run. And I tends to bluff on a weak hand.”

People need vampires,” she said. “They helps ’em remember what stakes and garlic are for.”

“The world is . . . different.” Oats’s gaze went out across the haze, and the forests, and the purple mountains. “Everywhere I look I see something holy.” For the first time since he’d met her, he saw Granny Weatherwax smile properly.

No one had ever had to sleep next to it, to curb its wilder excesses by means of a kick, a prod in the small of the back or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had years in a lonely bedroom to perfect the knark, the graaah and the gnoc, gnoc, gnoc unimpeded by the nudges, jabs and occasional attempts at murder that usually moderate the snore impulse over time.

Lancre people weren’t too concerned about religion, but they knew what it ought to sound like.

he’d never encountered quite this amount of enthusiasm or, if it came to it, this amount of flying mucus. It was disconcerting.