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“Female wizards aren’t right either! It’s the wrong kind of magic for women, is wizard magic, it’s all books and stars and jommetry. She’d never grasp it. Whoever heard of a female wizard?” “There’s witches,” said the smith uncertainly. “And enchantresses too, I’ve heard.” “Witches is a different thing altogether,” snapped Granny Weatherwax. “It’s magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get the hang of it.
“Do you know how wizards like to be buried?” “Yes!” “Well, how?” Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs. “Reluctantly.”
But magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.
“I don’t think magic works like that,” said Esk. “You can’t just make things happen, there’s a sort of—like a seesaw thing, if you push one end down, the other end goes up . . .”
Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push.
It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted.
“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
This was the time, when night wasn’t quite over but day hadn’t quite begun, when thoughts stood out bright and clear and without disguise.
In the Ramtops witches were accorded a status similar to that which other cultures gave to nuns, or tax collectors, or cesspit cleaners. That is to say, they were respected, sometimes admired, generally applauded for doing a job which logically had to be done, but people never felt quite comfortable in the same room with them.
“Now bees,” said Granny Weatherwax, “is real magic.” She carefully lifted the lid of the first hive. “Your bees,” she went on, “is your mead, your wax, your bee gum, your honey. A wonderful thing is your bee. Ruled by a queen, too,” she added, with a touch of approval.
“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.
Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
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.
it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.
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.
Eventually he kicked the bristles and gave a long intake of breath, a sort of reverse whistle, which is the secret sign of craftsmen across the universe and means that something expensive is about to happen.
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.
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.
Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it. It was a different matter if people who ought to know better did it, though. She considered that the future was a frail enough thing at best, and if people looked at it hard they changed it.
Granny suffered from robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility.
“I look at it all like this,” he said. “Before I heard him talk, I was like everyone else. You know what I mean? I was confused and uncertain about all the little details of life. But now,” he brightened up, “while I’m still confused and uncertain it’s on a much higher plane, d’you see, and 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.
“Million-to-one chances,” she said, “crop up nine times out of ten.”
