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

by Terry Pratchett

Here it comes now. Watch closely, the special effects are quite expensive. A bass note sounds. It is a deep, vibrating chord that hints that the brass section may break in at any moment with a fanfare for the cosmos, because the scene is the blackness of deep space with a few stars glittering like the dandruff on the shoulders of God.

Then it comes into view overhead, bigger than the biggest, most unpleasantly armed starcruiser in the imagination of a three-ring filmmaker:

The storm walked around the hills on legs of lightning, shouting and grumbling.

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.

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.

Time passed, which, basically, is its job.

But magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

became a broken crockery day,

The white cat, or possibly one of its descendants, since the cats led a private and complicated life of their own in the hayloft next to the forge,

Front doors in Bad Ass were used only by brides and corpses,

She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them—when she thought about them at all—as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about.

That’s one form of magic, of course.” “What, just knowing things?” “Knowing things that other people don’t know,” said Granny.

nicely as possible. “You’re a bit young for this,” she said, “but as you grow older you’ll find most people don’t set foot outside their own heads much.

For once the sky was clear, the high Ramtops standing out crisp and white like the brides of the sky (with their trousseaux stuffed with thunderstorms)

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.

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.

Gander considered that gnolls didn’t look any better inside than out. He hated their guts.

curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.

The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.

Ha! Robert Frost!

the root of a plant that gave an ultrasonic scream when it was uprooted.

It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

prevent them being stolen . . . One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orangutan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from.

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

The light was misty and actinic, the sort of light to make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer.

mountain ranges. A prism beside it held another slowly turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer

She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal.

“Million-to-one chances,” she said, “crop up nine times out of ten.”

tropical and sultry, and incline to hot winds and fireballs. But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.

“There were more old people. The world was full of them,” said the wizard. “Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.”

“Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle. “I don’t think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say.” Cutangle gave this some thought. “I think you’re wrong there,” he said. “I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.” “Ah, but it wasn’t the same river.” “It wasn’t?” “No.” Cutangle shrugged. “It looked like the same bloody river.” “No need to take that tone,” said Granny. “I don’t see why I should listen to that sort of language from a wizard who can’t even answer letters!”

The library was full of wizards, who care about their books in the same way that ants care about their eggs and in time of difficulty carry them around in much the same way.

I guess i must be a wizard!