Equal Rites
…no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed. (ER)
‘Do you know how wizards like to be buried?’
‘Yes!’
‘Well, how?’
Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Reluctantly.’ (ER)
…magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass. (ER)
… on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight. (ER)
Granny bit her lip. 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 enquired about. (ER)
‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege. (ER)
…she was aware that somewhere under her complicated strata of vests and petticoats there was some skin, that didn’t mean to say she approved of it. (ER)
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. (ER)
‘If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse.’
‘What’s an elephant?’
‘A kind of badger,’ said Granny. She hadn’t maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance. (ER)
‘That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.’ (ER)
‘They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.’ (ER)
‘…there’s no male witches, only silly men’ (ER)
‘Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all-’ Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, ‘-jommetry.’ (ER)
She had got ‘diuerse’ out of the Almanack, which she read every night. It was always predicting ‘diuerse plagues’ and ‘diurse ill-fortune’. Granny wasn’t entirely sure what it meant but it was a damn good word all the same. (ER)
…Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph. (ER)
‘You said there was some sort of teaching place?’ he hazarded.
‘The Unseen University, yes. It’s for training wizards.’
‘And you know where it is?’
‘Yes,’ lied Granny, whose grasp of geography was slightly worse than her knowledge of subatomic physics. (ER)
A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them. (ER)
Granny had warned her at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was now determined to see one or two of them for herself. (ER)
The landlord of the Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head. (ER)
… no one can outstare a witch, ‘cept a goat, of course. (ER)
The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Milk,’ said the child, still focusing furiously. ‘You get it out of goats. You know?’
Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. (ER)
Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t. (ER)
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 expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. (ER)
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. (ER)
‘If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?’
‘Can’t girls seek their fortune?’
‘I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune.’ (ER)
Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer’. They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing. (ER)
…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. (ER)
...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. (ER)
Gander looked at the lad in question. He had met a good many wizards in his time and considered himself a good judge and he had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly-poached eggs. (ER)
‘And you say it actually managed to get airborne?’
‘It flew like a bird,’ said Granny.
The dwarf lit a pipe. ‘I should very much like to see that bird,’ he said reflectively. ‘I should imagine it’s quite something to watch a bird like that.’ (ER)
He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as self-centred as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to. (ER)
‘Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn’t always as people see it.’ (ER)
Of course, all magic changed the world in some way, wizards thought there was no other use for it – they didn’t truck with the idea of leaving the world as it was and changing the people…. (ER)
For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. (ER)
She had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never inquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet. (ER)
The Shades, in brief, were an abode of discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and pedlars in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization’s axle. (ER)
…her clients had money, which was useful, but they also paid in respect, and that was a rock-hard currency. (ER)
…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. (ER)
‘…a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper.’ (ER)
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 had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn’t be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.
Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination. (ER)
It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. This is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in generally high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well. (ER)
… writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned. (ER)
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. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also get a lot of respect. (ER)
…fossils were well-known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn’t really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene. (ER)
It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional décor ends up either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotene yellow or surgical appliance pink. (ER)
‘City people are always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food.’ (ER)
There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off shelves on to one’s head, but the keeper of a magic library is no job for the unwary. (ER)
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.’
Treatle nodded. ‘I hadn’t looked at it like that,’ he said, ‘but you’re absolutely right. He’s really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There’s so much about the universe we don’t know’.
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things. (ER)
'I can see you've been getting ideas below your station ...' (ER)
… it is very hard to look dignified with a napkin tucked into one’s collar. (ER)
Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving an impression of a beginners’ ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VIII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well. (ER)
‘You’re wizards!’ she screamed. ‘Bloody well wizz!’ (ER)
It was the sort of smile that wolves ran away from. (ER)
‘Million-to-one chances,’ she said, ‘crop up nine times out of ten.’ (ER)
He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him. (ER)
What really terrified him about the sea was that the only thing between him and the horrible things that lived at the bottom of it was water. (ER)
‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny.
‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’
‘The sunsets were redder.’
‘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.’ (ER)
…direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the well-known principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots. (ER)
‘… children throw us all away sooner or later.’ (ER)
Like pillion passengers since the dawn of time, he persisted in leaning the wrong way. (ER)
It had the thick texture of authentic Ankh water - too stiff to drink, too runny to plough. (ER)
That’s wizards for you, he thought gloomily as he waded between the dripping arches, always probing the infinite but never noticing the definite, especially in the matter of household chores. (ER)
He had a cold certainty that while of course no one could possibly blame him for all this, everybody would. (ER)
‘It’s never happened before.’
‘Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.’ (ER)
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 ever there was a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way 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’. (ER)
‘Do you know how wizards like to be buried?’
‘Yes!’
‘Well, how?’
Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Reluctantly.’ (ER)
…magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass. (ER)
… on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight. (ER)
Granny bit her lip. 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 enquired about. (ER)
‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege. (ER)
…she was aware that somewhere under her complicated strata of vests and petticoats there was some skin, that didn’t mean to say she approved of it. (ER)
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. (ER)
‘If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse.’
‘What’s an elephant?’
‘A kind of badger,’ said Granny. She hadn’t maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance. (ER)
‘That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.’ (ER)
‘They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.’ (ER)
‘…there’s no male witches, only silly men’ (ER)
‘Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all-’ Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, ‘-jommetry.’ (ER)
She had got ‘diuerse’ out of the Almanack, which she read every night. It was always predicting ‘diuerse plagues’ and ‘diurse ill-fortune’. Granny wasn’t entirely sure what it meant but it was a damn good word all the same. (ER)
…Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph. (ER)
‘You said there was some sort of teaching place?’ he hazarded.
‘The Unseen University, yes. It’s for training wizards.’
‘And you know where it is?’
‘Yes,’ lied Granny, whose grasp of geography was slightly worse than her knowledge of subatomic physics. (ER)
A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them. (ER)
Granny had warned her at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was now determined to see one or two of them for herself. (ER)
The landlord of the Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head. (ER)
… no one can outstare a witch, ‘cept a goat, of course. (ER)
The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Milk,’ said the child, still focusing furiously. ‘You get it out of goats. You know?’
Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. (ER)
Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t. (ER)
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 expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. (ER)
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. (ER)
‘If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?’
‘Can’t girls seek their fortune?’
‘I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune.’ (ER)
Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer’. They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing. (ER)
…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. (ER)
...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. (ER)
Gander looked at the lad in question. He had met a good many wizards in his time and considered himself a good judge and he had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly-poached eggs. (ER)
‘And you say it actually managed to get airborne?’
‘It flew like a bird,’ said Granny.
The dwarf lit a pipe. ‘I should very much like to see that bird,’ he said reflectively. ‘I should imagine it’s quite something to watch a bird like that.’ (ER)
He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as self-centred as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to. (ER)
‘Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn’t always as people see it.’ (ER)
Of course, all magic changed the world in some way, wizards thought there was no other use for it – they didn’t truck with the idea of leaving the world as it was and changing the people…. (ER)
For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. (ER)
She had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never inquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet. (ER)
The Shades, in brief, were an abode of discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and pedlars in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization’s axle. (ER)
…her clients had money, which was useful, but they also paid in respect, and that was a rock-hard currency. (ER)
…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. (ER)
‘…a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper.’ (ER)
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 had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn’t be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.
Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination. (ER)
It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. This is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in generally high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well. (ER)
… writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned. (ER)
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. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also get a lot of respect. (ER)
…fossils were well-known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn’t really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene. (ER)
It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional décor ends up either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotene yellow or surgical appliance pink. (ER)
‘City people are always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food.’ (ER)
There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off shelves on to one’s head, but the keeper of a magic library is no job for the unwary. (ER)
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.’
Treatle nodded. ‘I hadn’t looked at it like that,’ he said, ‘but you’re absolutely right. He’s really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There’s so much about the universe we don’t know’.
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things. (ER)
'I can see you've been getting ideas below your station ...' (ER)
… it is very hard to look dignified with a napkin tucked into one’s collar. (ER)
Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving an impression of a beginners’ ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VIII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well. (ER)
‘You’re wizards!’ she screamed. ‘Bloody well wizz!’ (ER)
It was the sort of smile that wolves ran away from. (ER)
‘Million-to-one chances,’ she said, ‘crop up nine times out of ten.’ (ER)
He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him. (ER)
What really terrified him about the sea was that the only thing between him and the horrible things that lived at the bottom of it was water. (ER)
‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny.
‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’
‘The sunsets were redder.’
‘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.’ (ER)
…direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the well-known principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots. (ER)
‘… children throw us all away sooner or later.’ (ER)
Like pillion passengers since the dawn of time, he persisted in leaning the wrong way. (ER)
It had the thick texture of authentic Ankh water - too stiff to drink, too runny to plough. (ER)
That’s wizards for you, he thought gloomily as he waded between the dripping arches, always probing the infinite but never noticing the definite, especially in the matter of household chores. (ER)
He had a cold certainty that while of course no one could possibly blame him for all this, everybody would. (ER)
‘It’s never happened before.’
‘Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.’ (ER)
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 ever there was a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way 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’. (ER)
