Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1)

by Terry Pratchett

“They’re both magic. If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse.” “What’s an elephant?” “A kind of badger,” said Granny. She hadn’t maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.

They say I’m not the right sort, but I say there’d be many a family in this town a good deal bigger and poorer if it wasn’t for Madame Goatfounder’s Pennyroyal Preventives.

It didn’t occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn’t about to act ungrateful.

What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn’t understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it “a nice way of saying something nasty.”

Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer.” They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.

a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.

It is a common error to refer to the lower magical ranks as hedge wizards. In fact hedge wizardry is a very honored and specialized form of magic that attracts silent, thoughtful men of the druidical persuasion and topiaric inclinations. If you invited a hedge wizard to a party he would spend half the evening talking to your potted plant. And he would spend the other half listening.