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January 11 - July 18, 2019
“This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.” It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head, you couldn’t make them work at all.
In the middle of the seesaw is a place that never moves.
“No one saw you there. I would have known if they did,” Miss Treason said. “Aye? Weel, we’re good at no one seein’ us,” said Rob Anybody, smiling.
The trouble with being this old, you know, is that being young is so far away from me now that it seems sometimes that it happened to someone else.
A witch didn’t do things because they seemed a good idea at the time! That was practically cackling! You had to deal every day with people who were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably improved if you gave them a slap. But you didn’t because, as Miss Tick had once explained: a) it would make the world a better place for only a very short time; b) it would then make the world a slightly worse place; and c) you’re not supposed to be as stupid as they are.
They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?
Some people think that “coven” is a word for a group of witches, and it’s true that’s what the dictionary says. But the real word for a group of witches is an “argument.”
There was no sense in killing your enemy. How would she know you’d won?
“But she—” Miss Tick began, because no teacher likes to hear anyone else talk for very long.
So that was poker, was it? Well, she hadn’t been too bad at it, once she’d worked out that it was all about making your face tell lies. For most of the time the cards were just something to do with your hands.
“If any ground is Consecrate, this ground is. If any day is Holy, it is this day.”
Tiffany sat on a stump and cried a bit, because it needed to be done. Then she went and milked the goats, because someone had to do that, too.
Of course it made sense. It was all Boffo! Every stick is a wand, every puddle is a crystal ball. No thing had any power that you didn’t put there. Shambles and skulls and wands were like . . . shovels and knives and spectacles. They were like . . . levers. With a lever you could lift a big rock, but the lever didn’t do any work.
It was noon. Tiffany had invented the word noonlight because she liked the sound of it. Anyone could be a witch at midnight, she’d thought, but you’d have to be really good to be a witch by noonlight.
Romancin’ is verra important, ye ken. Basically it’s a way the boy can get close to the girl wi’oot her attackin’ him and scratchin’ his eyes oot.”
Tiffany had never been able to find out much about the librarians. They were a bit like the wandering priests and teachers who went even into the smallest, loneliest villages to deliver those things—prayers, medicine, facts—that people could do without for weeks at a time but sometimes needed a lot of all at once.
Look, just because a woman’s got no teeth doesn’t mean she’s wise. It might just mean she’s been stupid for a very long time.
“But I didn’t call on anyone!” “You did,” said Anoia, blowing more sparks. “You cussed. Sooner or later, every curse is a prayer.”
It was the egg slicer. Everyone has one, and no one knows why. Did anyone in the world ever knowingly go out one day and buy an egg slicer? I don’t think so.”
People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.
Tiffany gingerly picked up the Cornucopia, and again there was that definite feeling of some hugely heavy thing pretending, very successfully, to be light.
They weren’t making much noise, just the occasional werk a chicken makes when it’s a bit uncertain about things, which is more or less all the time.
She did, eventually, find a staircase that went up (unless, of course, you started at the top).
There be a lot o’ men who became heroes ’cuz they wuz too scared tae run!
They had been everywhere, and every toothy mouth was looking at him. It should not be possible to look with teeth.
The center of the seesaw does not move. It feels neither upness nor downness. It is balanced.
She was walking on a stage after the play was over, and who now could say it had ever happened?
