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

by Terry Pratchett

Time passed, which, basically, is its job.

“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.

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

“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.

but 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.

Esk, of course, had not been trained, and 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.

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.

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

“I don’t think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say.”

“Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.”

(There should be a word for words that sound like things would sound like if they made a noise, he thought. The word “glisten” does indeed gleam oilily, and if there was ever a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way the lights of cities would creep across the world if the whole of human civilization was crammed into one night, then you couldn’t do better than “coruscate.”)