Quotes from Magrat

.... there is noone like Magrat for getting in the way of her own life. (LL)
'Something comes,’she said.
‘Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?’ said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books.
‘The pricking of my ears,’ said Granny.  (WS)

There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn’t rule the world. They’re called witches and wizards, Magrat reflected ...  (WS)

Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system,’ said Magrat.  ‘If you could see inside your colon you’d be horrified.'
‘I think I would,’ muttered Hwel.  (WS)

'Witches just aren’t like that,’ said Magrat. ‘We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.'  (WS)

Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.  (WS)

Magrat knew she had lost.  You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how.  (WS)

'So what you’re saying,’ said Magrat, icily, ‘is that this “not meddling” thing is like taking a vow not to swim.  You’ll absolutely never break it unless of course you happen to find yourself in the water?'  (WS)

'Don’t you want to die nobly for a just cause?’
‘I’d much rather live quietly for one.'  (WS)

Magrat peered around timidly.  Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered.
‘What’s to be afraid of?’ she managed.
‘Us,’ said Granny Weatherwax, smugly.  (WS)

‘Yes, yes,’ said Magrat.  ‘Sorry.’
‘Right,’ said Granny, slightly mollified.  She’d never mastered the talent for apologising, but she appreciated it 
in other people. (WS)

Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow. (WS)

'...what about this rule about not meddling?’ said Magrat.
'Ah,’said Nanny.  She took the girl’s arm.  ‘The thing is,’ she explained, ‘as you progress in the Craft, you’ll learn there is another rule. Esme’s obeyed it all her life.’
‘And what’s that?’
'When you break rules, break ‘em good and hard,’ said Nanny, and grinned a set of gums that were more menacing than teeth.  (WS)

Grammer Bevis wrinkled her forehead.
‘Magrat?’ she said.  She tried to get a mental picture of the Ramtops’ youngest witch and recalled – well, not a face, just a slightly watery-eyed expression of hopeless goodwill wedged between a body like a maypole and hair like a haystack after a gale.  A relentless doer of good works.  A worrier.  The kind of person who rescued small lost baby birds and cried when they died, which is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds. (WA)

In the dim light she could see Granny’s face which seemed to be suggesting that if Magrat was at her wits’ end, it was a short stroll.  (WA)

It had taken many years under the tutelage of Granny Weatherwax for Magrat to learn that the common kitchen breadknife was better than the most ornate of magical knives. It could do all that the magical knife could do, plus you could also use it to cut bread.  (WA)

Magrat unfolded a map.  It was creased, damp, and the pencil had run.  She pointed cautiously to a smudged area.
‘I think we’re here,’ she said.
‘My word,’ said Nanny Ogg, whose grasp of the principles of cartography was even shakier than Granny’s. ‘Amazing how we can all fit on that little bit of paper.'  (WA)

Magrat might always be trying to find herself, but Granny didn’t even understand the idea of the search.  (WA)

Magrat would be the first to admit that she had an open mind. It was as open as a field, as open as the sky. No mind could be more open without special surgical implements. And she was always waiting for something to fill it up. (WA)
​
Magrat leaned down and set her face in the idiot grimace generally used by adults who’d love to be good with children and don’t stand a dog’s chance of ever achieving it. (WA)

Magrat bought occult jewellery as a sort of distraction from being Magrat. She had three large boxes of the stuff and was still exactly the same person. (WA)
​
'The good are innocent and create justice.  The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.'  (WA)

The trouble with witches is that they’ll never run away from things they really hate.
And the trouble with small furry animals in a corner is that, just occasionally, one of them’s a mongoose.  (WA)

'Our Sean read to me in the almanac where there’s all these fearsome wild beasts in foreign parts,’ he whispered.  ‘Huge hairy things that leap out on travellers, it said. I’d hate to think what’d happen if they leapt out on mum and Granny.’
Magrat looked up into his big red face.
‘You will see no harm comes to them, won’t you?’ said Jason.
‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, hoping that he needn’t.  ‘I’ll do my best.’
Jason nodded.  ‘Only it said in the almanac that some of them were nearly extinct anyway,’ he said. (WA)

'Look,' said Magrat desperately, ‘why don’t I go by myself?’
‘‘Cos you ain’t experienced at fairy godmothering,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
This was too much even for Magrat’s generous soul.
‘Well, nor are you,’ she said.
‘That’s true,’ Granny conceded.  ‘But the point is…the point is…the point is we’ve not been experienced for a lot longer than you.'  (WA)

'We're her godmothers,’said Granny.
‘That’s right,’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘We’ve got a wand too,’ said Magrat.
‘But you hate godmothers, Mistress Weatherwax,’ said Mrs Gogol.
‘We’re the other kind,’ said Granny.  ‘We’re the kind that give people what they know they really need, not what we think they ought to want.'  (WA)

Perdita remembered Magrat bringing a guitar to a Hogswatchnight party once and singing wobbly folk songs with her eyes shut in a way that suggested that she really believed in them. She hadn’t been able to play, but this was all right because she couldn’t sing, either.  (LL)

... Verence being a king, was allowed a gyrfalcon, whatever the hell that was, any earls in the vicinity could fly a peregrine, and priests were allowed sparrowhawks.  Commoners were just about allowed a stick to throw*.  
Magrat found herself wondering what Nanny Ogg would be allowed – a small chicken on a spring probably. There was no specific falcon for a witch but, as a queen, the Lancre rules of falconry allowed her to fly the wowhawk or Lappet-faced Worrier.  It was small and shortsighted and preferred to walk everywhere.  It fainted at the sight of blood.  And about twenty wowhawks could kill a pigeon, if it was a sick pigeon.  She’d spent an hour with one on her wrist.  It had wheezed at her, and eventually it had dozed off upside down.
*If it wasn’t a big stick.  (LL)

We taught her everything she knows,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘Yeah,’ said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. ‘D’you think ... maybe...?’
‘What?’ ‘D’you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything we know?’
‘It’d take too long.'  (LL)

… Magrat had never been any good at acting. She’d always felt she wasn’t very good at being Magrat, if it came to that. (LL)
​
She knew there was such a thing as heroic odds. Songs and ballads and stories and poems were full of stories about one person single-handedly taking on and defeating a vast number of enemies.
Only now was it dawning on her that the trouble was that they were songs and ballads and stories and poems because they dealt with things that were, not to put too fine a point on it, untrue.
She couldn’t now she had time to think about it, ever remember an example from history.  (LL)

I thought I’d show everyone what I’m made of. And now they’ll probably find out: I’m made of lots of tubes and greeny purple wobbly bits.  (LL)

She was shaking.  But she was still alive, and that felt good.  That’s the thing about being alive.  You’re alive to enjoy it.  (LL)

.... there is noone like Magrat for getting in the way of her own life. (LL)
​
'You mean just because she’s a woman she should use sexual wiles on him?’ said Magrat. ‘This is so ... so ... well, it’s so Nanny Ogg, that’s all I can say.’
‘She should use any wile she can lay her hands on,’said Nanny.  (CJ)

She thinks she has a romantic soul.  In fact she has a very solid and down-to-earth soul that underpins a romantic mind.  (PP)