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

by Terry Pratchett

It was, in fact, one of those places that exist merely so that people can have come from them. The universe is littered with them: hidden villages, windswept little towns under wide skies, isolated cabins on chilly mountains, whose only mark on history is to be the incredibly ordinary place where something extraordinary started to happen. Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all gynecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall.

the sort of features that promised to become, if not beautiful, then at least attractively interesting.

Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.

Esk stared at the patchwork quilt under the old woman, because there were times when a little detail could expand and fill the whole world.

“I think you just know a lot about bees.” Granny grinned. “Exactly correct. That’s one form of magic, of course.” “What, just knowing things?” “Knowing things that other people don’t know,”

But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?

sound. Granny never laughed, she merely let the corners of her mouth turn up, but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.

although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.

He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.

if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.

it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done.

One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry. Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of thought and muscle than more socially acceptable professions but, nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this, plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.

Granny had counted the temples with a thoughtful look in her eyes; gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches.

at least I know I’m bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.”

They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.

always probing the infinite but never noticing the definite, especially in the matter of household chores.

“Where does it go?” “It just becomes an idea of itself, I think.”

“Right,” he said, and raised it in the classical revengeful wizard’s pose. “I’ll show them!” “No, wrong.” “What do you mean, wrong? I’ve got the power!” “They’re sort of—reflections of us,” said Esk. “You can’t beat your reflections, they’ll always be as strong as you are. That’s why they draw nearer to you when you start using magic. And they don’t get tired. They feed off magic, so you can’t beat them with magic. No, the thing is…well, not using magic because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can, that really upsets them. They hate the idea. If people stopped using magic they’d die.”

“She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need,”