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

by Terry Pratchett

The living often don’t appreciate how complicated the world looks when you are dead, because while death frees the mind from the straitjacket of three dimensions it also cuts it away from Time, which is only another dimension. So while the cat that rubbed up against his invisible legs was undoubtedly the same cat that he had seen a few minutes before, it was also quite clearly a tiny kitten and a fat, half-blind old moggy and every stage in between. All at once. Since it had started off small it looked like a white, cat-shaped carrot, a description that will have to do until people invent proper four-dimensional adjectives.

Esk waited, listening until the silence roared in her ears.

Cern normally had all the sensitivity of a ball bearing, but his hand stopped in mid-prod, much to his surprise.

Hilta Goatfounder was all lace and shawls and colors and earrings and so many bangles that a mere movement of her arms sounded like a percussion section falling off a cliff.

It suddenly turned, narrowed its little red eyes, bit its keeper sharply in the leg, snapped its chain and had it away over the rooftops with the night’s takings in a tin cup. History is silent about what they were spent on.

There was a doorway ahead of her that looked friendly. Cheerful sounds were sliding out on the yellow light, and pooling on the cobbles.

He looked hard at the staff and his eyebrows met conspiratorially over his nose.

It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mind than, say, the mind of a fox. The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur, wants to know why. This is why. Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time. The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and time-pieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband—and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.

But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.

One of my favorite passages

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them.

The old witch leaned forward and put her hand on Esk’s forehead; it was like being caressed by a sock full of warm dice.

An observer on some suitable high point, let’s say for the sake of argument a wisp of cirro-stratus on the edge of space, would remark on how lovingly the light spreads across the land, how it leaps forward on the plains and slows down when it encounters high ground, how beautifully it… Actually, there are some kinds of observers who, faced with all this beauty, will whine that you can’t have heavy light and certainly wouldn’t be able to see it, even if you could. To which one can only reply, so how come you’re standing on a cloud?

This felt very Douglas Adams

Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it.

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact,

One important difference was that a moth’s face, even close up, was as friendly as a bunny rabbit’s compared to the things watching Simon.

The gray Things wavered and vanished. Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left. Silence settled like thick velvet, wave after wave of it. A heavy, echoing silence. A few books dropped heavily out of the air, feeling silly.