Maskerade by Terry Pratchett
Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed even to think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat. (Ma)
People who didn’t need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn’t need people. (Ma)
There was no point freezing your nadgers off on top of some mountain while communing with the Infinite unless you could rely on a lot of impressionable young women to come along occasionally and say ‘Gosh’. (Ma)
And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets that you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up. (Ma)
She stopped. At least, most of Agnes stopped. It took some time for outlying regions to come to rest. (Ma)
Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. (Ma)
... The first frost of the season, a petal nipping, fruit-withering little scorcher that showed you why they called Nature a mother ... (Ma)
Bonnie Quarney had been gathering nuts in May with William Simple, and it was only because she'd thought ahead and taken a little advice from Nanny that she wouldn't be bearing fruit in February. (Ma)
The people of Lancre thought that marriage was a very serious step that ought to be done properly, so they practiced quite a lot. (Ma)
Lancre's only other singer of note was Nanny Ogg, whose attitude to songs was purely ballistic. You just pointed your voice at the end of the verse and went for it. (Ma)
She'd long ago been resigned to the fact that people expected a bottle of something funny-coloured and sticky. It wasn't the medicine that did the trick though. It was, in a way, the spoon. (Ma)
Agnes was, Nanny considered, quite good-looking in an expansive kind of way; she was a fine figure of typical Lancre womanhood. This meant she was approximately two womanhoods from anywhere else. (Ma)
Not liking Christine would be like not liking small fluffy animals. And Christine was just like a small fluffy animal. It was certainly impossible for her to get a whole idea into her head in one go. She had to nibble it into manageable bits. (Ma)
No one had asked her, before she was born, whether she’d want a lovely personality or whether she’d prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take size 9 in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys. (Ma)
Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beermug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for. (Ma)
‘You never have been very good at numbers, have you?’ said Granny. Now she drew a circle around the final figure.
‘Oh, you know me, Esme’ said Nanny cheerfully. ‘I couldn’t subtract a fart from a plate of beans.’ (Ma)
Granny looked out at the dull grey sky and the dying leaves and felt, amazingly enough, her sap rising. A day ago the future had looked aching and desolate, and now it looked full of surprises and terror and bad things happening to people….
If she had anything to do with it, anyway. (Ma)
‘You mean you just see things that are really there?’ he said. ‘I can see you haven’t been with the opera for long, dear.’ (Ma)
‘Let’s see what else we’ve got ... ah, has anybody got an opener for a bottle of beer?’
A man in the corner indicated that he might have such a thing.
‘Fine,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Anyone got something to drink a bottle of beer out of?’
Another man nodded hopefully.
‘Good,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Now, has anyone got a bottle of beer?’ (Ma)
At home Granny Weatherwax slept with open windows and an unlocked door, secure in the knowledge that the Ramtops’ various creatures of the night would rather eat their own ears than break in. (Ma)
‘Gytha, is there anything in the whole world you can’t make sound grubby?’
‘Not found it yet, Esme,’ said Nanny brightly. (Ma)
'I have faith.'
REALLY? IN WHAT PARTICULAR DEITY?
'Oh, none of them.'
THEN FAITH IN WHAT?
'Just faith, you know. In general.' (Ma)
Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows.*
*Er. That is to say, they went to bed at the same time as the chickens went to bed, and got up at the same time as the cows got up. Loosely worded sayings can really cause misunderstandings. (Ma)
They said love always found a way and, of course, so did a number of associated activities. (Ma)
People always tended to assume that she could cope, as if capability went with mass, like gravity. (Ma)
She felt the same feeling she’d felt back home. Sometimes life reaches that desperate point where the wrong thing to do has to be the right thing to do.
It doesn’t matter what direction you go. Sometimes you just have to go. (Ma)
'I must catch up on my sleep.'
'Don't worry, I shouldn't think it's had time to get far away,' said Nanny. (Ma)
Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought. And because the theatre was fiction made flesh, she hated the theatre most of all. But that was it – hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned. (Ma)
The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille. (Ma)
After you’d known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way. (Ma)
Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories. (Ma)
Distillation of alcohol was illegal in Lancre. On the other hand, King Verence had long ago given up any idea of stopping a witch doing something she wanted to do, so merely required Nanny Ogg to keep her still somewhere it wasn’t obvious. She thoroughly approved of the prohibition, since this gave her an unchallenged market for her own product, known wherever men fell backwards into a ditch as ‘suicider.’ (Ma)
‘I’m Mrs Ogg,’ said Nanny Ogg.
The man looked her up and down.
‘Oh yes? Can you identify yourself?’
‘Certainly. I’d know me anywhere.’ (Ma)
‘Honestly, Salzella ... what is the difference between opera and madness?’
‘Is this a trick question?’
‘No!’
‘Then I’d say: better scenery.’ (Ma)
Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages; she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a new one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentically foreign gibberish. (Ma)
‘We got to be careful. People can be very tricky when they’re in a grip of a strange occult force. Remember Mr. Scruple over in Slice?’
‘That wasn’t a strange occult force. That was acid stomach.’
‘Well, it certainly seemed strangely occult for a while. Especially if the windows were shut.’ (Ma)
‘There’s your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like “Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh, I am dyin’, oh, oh, oh, that’s what I’m doin’” and there’s your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes “Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!” although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That’s basically all of opera, reely.’
‘What? Either dyin’ or drinkin’ beer?’
‘Basically, yes,’ said Nanny, contriving to suggest that this was the whole gamut of human experience.
‘And that’s opera?’
‘We-ll…there might be some other stuff. But mostly it’s stout or stabbin’.’ (Ma)
There seemed to be a lot of feathers down there, and here and there the glint of jewellery. Shoulders were being worn bare this season. A lot of attention had been paid to appearances. The people were here to look, not to see. (Ma)
Nanny’s philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down. (Ma)
‘Let me through. I’m a nosy person…’ (Ma)
Nanny rather liked the theatrical world. It was its own kind of magic. That was why Esme disliked it, she reckoned. It was the magic of illusions and misdirection and foolery, and that was fine by Nanny Ogg, because you couldn’t be married three times without a little fooling. (Ma)
People didn’t take any notice of little old ladies who looked as though they fitted in, and Nanny Ogg could fit in faster than a dead chicken in a maggot factory. (Ma)
Looking into Granny's eyes was like looking into a mirror. What you saw looking back at you was yourself and there was no hiding-place. (Ma)
She was a good witch. That was her role in life. That was the burden she had to bear. Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong. (Ma)
…there are some people who are destined to be carried to comfortable couches and some people whose only fate is fetching a bowl of cold water. (Ma)
‘I’d better go and round up the orchestra. They’ll all be at the Stab In The Back over the road. The swine can get through half a pint before the applause has died away.’
‘Are they capable of playing?’
‘They never have been, so I don’t see why they should start now,’ said Salzella. (Ma)
Washing-up is a badge of membership anywhere. (Ma)
Nanny enjoyed music, as well. If music were the food of love, she was game for a sonata and chips at any time. (Ma)
She knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hug on to it for years, and she knew about new money, which seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in her hand rather than someone else’s. The best kind of money was mine, not yours. (Ma)
'Money don't buy happiness, Gytha.'
'I only wanted to rent it for a few weeks.' (Ma)
‘Gytha Ogg, you wouldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t jump to conclusions, right?’
Nanny nodded. ‘Oh, yes.’ There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start. (Ma)
‘It’s only money.’
‘Yes, but it’s only my money, not only your money,’ Nanny pointed out.
‘We witches have always held everything in common, you know that,’ said Granny.
‘Well, yes,’ said Nanny, and once again cut to the heart of the sociopolitical debate. ‘It’s easy to hold everything in common when no one’s got anything.’ (Ma)
His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people. (Ma)
Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room. (Ma)
It had always seemed to him that one of the major flaws in the whole business of opera was the audience. They were quite unsuitable. The only ones worse than the ones who didn't know anything at all about music, and whose idea of a sensible observation was 'I liked that bit near the end when her voice went wobbly' were the ones who thought they did .... (Ma)
Nanny Ogg was basically a law-abiding person when she had no reason to break the law, and therefore had that kind of person’s attitude to law-enforcement officers, which was one of deep and permanent distrust. (Ma)
The human mind was a deep and abiding mystery and the Librarian was glad he didn’t have one any more. (Ma)
It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end. (Ma)
He looked evil in an interesting kind of way, like a pirate who really understood the words "Jolly Roger." (Ma)
‘You’re daft, Walter Plinge,’ she said.
‘Daft as a broom Mrs Ogg!’ said Walter cheerfully.
But you ain’t insane, she thought. You’re daft but you’re sane. That’s what Esme would say. And there’s worser things. (Ma)
... the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters ... (Ma)
‘Well, I think,’ said Nobby, ‘that when you have ruled out the impossible, what is left, however improbable, ain’t worth hanging around on a cold night wonderin’ about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink.’ (Ma)
‘Walter might not know his right from his left, but he does know his right from his wrong.’ (Ma)
Walter’s face was an agony of indecision but, erratic though his thinking might have been, it was no match for Nanny Ogg’s meretricious duplicity. He was up against a mind that regarded truth as a reference point but certainly not as a shackle. Nanny Ogg could think her way through a corkscrew in a tornado without touching the sides. (Ma)
‘I thought you didn’t like books,’ said Agnes.
‘I don’t,’ said Granny, turning a page. ‘They can look you right in the face and still lie.’ (Ma)
People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger in a pub. (Ma)
Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts too black even for a witch. (Ma)
A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick. (Ma)
'... if you do know Right from Wrong you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live.' (Ma)
She gave a depreciating little chuckle. And if Nanny Ogg had been listening, she would have resolved as follows: that no maddened cackle from Black Aliss of infamous memory, no evil little giggle from some crazed vampyre whose morals were worse than his spelling, no side-splitting guffaw from the most inventive torturer, was quite so unnerving as a happy little chuckle from a Granny Weatherwax about to do what’s best. (Ma)
'... them as makes the endings don't get them...' (Ma)
'You have got a choice. You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines ... or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are.' (Ma)
‘Never pick yourself a name you can’t scrub the floor in.’ (Ma)
‘Are you offering to teach me something?’
‘Teach? No,’ said Granny. ‘Ain’t got the patience for teaching. But I might let you learn.’ (Ma)
People who didn’t need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn’t need people. (Ma)
There was no point freezing your nadgers off on top of some mountain while communing with the Infinite unless you could rely on a lot of impressionable young women to come along occasionally and say ‘Gosh’. (Ma)
And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets that you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up. (Ma)
She stopped. At least, most of Agnes stopped. It took some time for outlying regions to come to rest. (Ma)
Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. (Ma)
... The first frost of the season, a petal nipping, fruit-withering little scorcher that showed you why they called Nature a mother ... (Ma)
Bonnie Quarney had been gathering nuts in May with William Simple, and it was only because she'd thought ahead and taken a little advice from Nanny that she wouldn't be bearing fruit in February. (Ma)
The people of Lancre thought that marriage was a very serious step that ought to be done properly, so they practiced quite a lot. (Ma)
Lancre's only other singer of note was Nanny Ogg, whose attitude to songs was purely ballistic. You just pointed your voice at the end of the verse and went for it. (Ma)
She'd long ago been resigned to the fact that people expected a bottle of something funny-coloured and sticky. It wasn't the medicine that did the trick though. It was, in a way, the spoon. (Ma)
Agnes was, Nanny considered, quite good-looking in an expansive kind of way; she was a fine figure of typical Lancre womanhood. This meant she was approximately two womanhoods from anywhere else. (Ma)
Not liking Christine would be like not liking small fluffy animals. And Christine was just like a small fluffy animal. It was certainly impossible for her to get a whole idea into her head in one go. She had to nibble it into manageable bits. (Ma)
No one had asked her, before she was born, whether she’d want a lovely personality or whether she’d prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take size 9 in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys. (Ma)
Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beermug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for. (Ma)
‘You never have been very good at numbers, have you?’ said Granny. Now she drew a circle around the final figure.
‘Oh, you know me, Esme’ said Nanny cheerfully. ‘I couldn’t subtract a fart from a plate of beans.’ (Ma)
Granny looked out at the dull grey sky and the dying leaves and felt, amazingly enough, her sap rising. A day ago the future had looked aching and desolate, and now it looked full of surprises and terror and bad things happening to people….
If she had anything to do with it, anyway. (Ma)
‘You mean you just see things that are really there?’ he said. ‘I can see you haven’t been with the opera for long, dear.’ (Ma)
‘Let’s see what else we’ve got ... ah, has anybody got an opener for a bottle of beer?’
A man in the corner indicated that he might have such a thing.
‘Fine,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Anyone got something to drink a bottle of beer out of?’
Another man nodded hopefully.
‘Good,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Now, has anyone got a bottle of beer?’ (Ma)
At home Granny Weatherwax slept with open windows and an unlocked door, secure in the knowledge that the Ramtops’ various creatures of the night would rather eat their own ears than break in. (Ma)
‘Gytha, is there anything in the whole world you can’t make sound grubby?’
‘Not found it yet, Esme,’ said Nanny brightly. (Ma)
'I have faith.'
REALLY? IN WHAT PARTICULAR DEITY?
'Oh, none of them.'
THEN FAITH IN WHAT?
'Just faith, you know. In general.' (Ma)
Most people in Lancre, as the saying goes, went to bed with the chickens and got up with the cows.*
*Er. That is to say, they went to bed at the same time as the chickens went to bed, and got up at the same time as the cows got up. Loosely worded sayings can really cause misunderstandings. (Ma)
They said love always found a way and, of course, so did a number of associated activities. (Ma)
People always tended to assume that she could cope, as if capability went with mass, like gravity. (Ma)
She felt the same feeling she’d felt back home. Sometimes life reaches that desperate point where the wrong thing to do has to be the right thing to do.
It doesn’t matter what direction you go. Sometimes you just have to go. (Ma)
'I must catch up on my sleep.'
'Don't worry, I shouldn't think it's had time to get far away,' said Nanny. (Ma)
Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought. And because the theatre was fiction made flesh, she hated the theatre most of all. But that was it – hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned. (Ma)
The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille. (Ma)
After you’d known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way. (Ma)
Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories. (Ma)
Distillation of alcohol was illegal in Lancre. On the other hand, King Verence had long ago given up any idea of stopping a witch doing something she wanted to do, so merely required Nanny Ogg to keep her still somewhere it wasn’t obvious. She thoroughly approved of the prohibition, since this gave her an unchallenged market for her own product, known wherever men fell backwards into a ditch as ‘suicider.’ (Ma)
‘I’m Mrs Ogg,’ said Nanny Ogg.
The man looked her up and down.
‘Oh yes? Can you identify yourself?’
‘Certainly. I’d know me anywhere.’ (Ma)
‘Honestly, Salzella ... what is the difference between opera and madness?’
‘Is this a trick question?’
‘No!’
‘Then I’d say: better scenery.’ (Ma)
Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages; she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a new one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentically foreign gibberish. (Ma)
‘We got to be careful. People can be very tricky when they’re in a grip of a strange occult force. Remember Mr. Scruple over in Slice?’
‘That wasn’t a strange occult force. That was acid stomach.’
‘Well, it certainly seemed strangely occult for a while. Especially if the windows were shut.’ (Ma)
‘There’s your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like “Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh, I am dyin’, oh, oh, oh, that’s what I’m doin’” and there’s your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes “Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!” although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That’s basically all of opera, reely.’
‘What? Either dyin’ or drinkin’ beer?’
‘Basically, yes,’ said Nanny, contriving to suggest that this was the whole gamut of human experience.
‘And that’s opera?’
‘We-ll…there might be some other stuff. But mostly it’s stout or stabbin’.’ (Ma)
There seemed to be a lot of feathers down there, and here and there the glint of jewellery. Shoulders were being worn bare this season. A lot of attention had been paid to appearances. The people were here to look, not to see. (Ma)
Nanny’s philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down. (Ma)
‘Let me through. I’m a nosy person…’ (Ma)
Nanny rather liked the theatrical world. It was its own kind of magic. That was why Esme disliked it, she reckoned. It was the magic of illusions and misdirection and foolery, and that was fine by Nanny Ogg, because you couldn’t be married three times without a little fooling. (Ma)
People didn’t take any notice of little old ladies who looked as though they fitted in, and Nanny Ogg could fit in faster than a dead chicken in a maggot factory. (Ma)
Looking into Granny's eyes was like looking into a mirror. What you saw looking back at you was yourself and there was no hiding-place. (Ma)
She was a good witch. That was her role in life. That was the burden she had to bear. Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong. (Ma)
…there are some people who are destined to be carried to comfortable couches and some people whose only fate is fetching a bowl of cold water. (Ma)
‘I’d better go and round up the orchestra. They’ll all be at the Stab In The Back over the road. The swine can get through half a pint before the applause has died away.’
‘Are they capable of playing?’
‘They never have been, so I don’t see why they should start now,’ said Salzella. (Ma)
Washing-up is a badge of membership anywhere. (Ma)
Nanny enjoyed music, as well. If music were the food of love, she was game for a sonata and chips at any time. (Ma)
She knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hug on to it for years, and she knew about new money, which seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in her hand rather than someone else’s. The best kind of money was mine, not yours. (Ma)
'Money don't buy happiness, Gytha.'
'I only wanted to rent it for a few weeks.' (Ma)
‘Gytha Ogg, you wouldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t jump to conclusions, right?’
Nanny nodded. ‘Oh, yes.’ There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start. (Ma)
‘It’s only money.’
‘Yes, but it’s only my money, not only your money,’ Nanny pointed out.
‘We witches have always held everything in common, you know that,’ said Granny.
‘Well, yes,’ said Nanny, and once again cut to the heart of the sociopolitical debate. ‘It’s easy to hold everything in common when no one’s got anything.’ (Ma)
His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people. (Ma)
Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room. (Ma)
It had always seemed to him that one of the major flaws in the whole business of opera was the audience. They were quite unsuitable. The only ones worse than the ones who didn't know anything at all about music, and whose idea of a sensible observation was 'I liked that bit near the end when her voice went wobbly' were the ones who thought they did .... (Ma)
Nanny Ogg was basically a law-abiding person when she had no reason to break the law, and therefore had that kind of person’s attitude to law-enforcement officers, which was one of deep and permanent distrust. (Ma)
The human mind was a deep and abiding mystery and the Librarian was glad he didn’t have one any more. (Ma)
It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end. (Ma)
He looked evil in an interesting kind of way, like a pirate who really understood the words "Jolly Roger." (Ma)
‘You’re daft, Walter Plinge,’ she said.
‘Daft as a broom Mrs Ogg!’ said Walter cheerfully.
But you ain’t insane, she thought. You’re daft but you’re sane. That’s what Esme would say. And there’s worser things. (Ma)
... the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters ... (Ma)
‘Well, I think,’ said Nobby, ‘that when you have ruled out the impossible, what is left, however improbable, ain’t worth hanging around on a cold night wonderin’ about when you could be getting on the outside of a big drink.’ (Ma)
‘Walter might not know his right from his left, but he does know his right from his wrong.’ (Ma)
Walter’s face was an agony of indecision but, erratic though his thinking might have been, it was no match for Nanny Ogg’s meretricious duplicity. He was up against a mind that regarded truth as a reference point but certainly not as a shackle. Nanny Ogg could think her way through a corkscrew in a tornado without touching the sides. (Ma)
‘I thought you didn’t like books,’ said Agnes.
‘I don’t,’ said Granny, turning a page. ‘They can look you right in the face and still lie.’ (Ma)
People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger in a pub. (Ma)
Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts too black even for a witch. (Ma)
A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick. (Ma)
'... if you do know Right from Wrong you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live.' (Ma)
She gave a depreciating little chuckle. And if Nanny Ogg had been listening, she would have resolved as follows: that no maddened cackle from Black Aliss of infamous memory, no evil little giggle from some crazed vampyre whose morals were worse than his spelling, no side-splitting guffaw from the most inventive torturer, was quite so unnerving as a happy little chuckle from a Granny Weatherwax about to do what’s best. (Ma)
'... them as makes the endings don't get them...' (Ma)
'You have got a choice. You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines ... or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are.' (Ma)
‘Never pick yourself a name you can’t scrub the floor in.’ (Ma)
‘Are you offering to teach me something?’
‘Teach? No,’ said Granny. ‘Ain’t got the patience for teaching. But I might let you learn.’ (Ma)
