... the world is full of omens, and you picked the ones you liked. (ISWM)
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'... it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.' (GO)'
'You can't say "if this didn't happen then that would have happened" because you don't know everything that might have happened. You might think something'd be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible.' (LL)
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)
Ponder Stibbons had once got one hundred percent in a prescience exam by getting there the previous day. (UA)
Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular. (WFM)
‘You never get bad fortunes in cookies, ever noticed that? They never say stuff like: “Oh dear, things’re going to be really bad.” I mean, they’re never misfortune cookies.’
Vimes lit a cigar and shook the match to put it out. ‘That, Corporal, is because of one of the fundamental driving forces of the universe.’ ‘What? Like, people who read fortune cookies are the lucky ones?’ said Nobby. ‘No. Because people who sell fortune cookies want to go on selling them.’ (FC) 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 makes you wonder if there is anything to astrology after all.’
‘Oh, there is,’ said Susan. ‘Delusion, wishful thinking and gullibility.' (TOT) Discworld constellations changed frequently as the world moved through the void, which meant that astrology was cutting edge research rather than, as elsewhere, a clever way of avoiding a proper job. It was amazing how human traits and affairs could so reliably and continuously be guided by a succession of big balls of plasma billions of miles away, most of whom have never even heard of humanity. (LC)
Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small. (RM)
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