The trouble with Polly was that she had a mind that asked questions even when she really, really didn’t want to know the answers. (MR)
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... once you’ve told Nanny Ogg you’d more or less told everyone else. (W)
It takes a long time for anything to happen inside the head of an ox, but, when it does, it happens extensively. (NW)
Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that’s who. (NW)
'... we didn't know the shadows were there until we had the light.' (AM)
And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done ... (WFM)
'I understood every word in that sentence, but not the sentence itself.' (CJ)
That's what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there's food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so we don't have to think, because if we think we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be. (N)
'I want to know why. Why everything. I don't know the answers, but a few days ago I didn't know there were questions.' (N)
'I've been living my life for a long time. I know how it works.' (LH)
Mustrum Ridcully believed that knowledge could be acquired by shouting at people ... (H)
It was beginning to dawn on Masklin that there was a different sort of knowledge, and it consisted of the things you needed to understand in order to survive among other nomes. Things like: be very careful when you tell people things they don’t want to hear. And: the thought that they may be wrong makes people very angry. (Truck)
'… you know how it is with boundaries,' Ridcully mumbled. 'You look at what's on the other side and you realize why there was a boundary in the first place.' (UA)
Learning had to be digested. You didn't just have to know, you have to comprehend. (UA)
'Carefully directed ignorance is the key to all knowledge.' (CCODD)
A witch was just someone who knew a bit more than you did. (W)
Once you know things, you’re a different person. You can’t help it. (Wings)
'If you don’t look after knowledge, it goes away.' (CP)
Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain calibre. (LC)
'He always thinks everything has to mean something,’ said Ridcully, who generally took the view that trying to find any deep meaning to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror: you always succeeded, but you didn’t learn anything new. (SODW)
Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into ‘true’and ‘false’, but instead could be ‘things that people needed to know at the moment’ and ‘things that they didn’t need to know at the moment’. (WFM)
... the seeker after truth had found truths instead. The Third Journey of the Prophet Cena, for example, seemed remarkably like a retranslation of the Testament of Sand in the Laotan Book of the Whole. On one shelf alone he found forty-three remarkably similar accounts of a great flood, and in every single one of them a man very much like Bishop Horn had saved the elect of mankind by building a magical boat. Details varied of course. Sometimes the boat was made of wood, sometimes of banana leaves. Sometimes the news of the emerging dry land was brought by a swan,
sometimes by an iguana. Of course these stories in the chronicles of other religions were mere folktales and myth, while the voyage detailed in the Book of Cena was holy truth. But nevertheless. (CJ) 'Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.' (SG)
People are coming to me all the time to ask things like, what kind of wedding anniversary d’you call it after ten years, or, is it lucky to plant beans on a Thursday. Of course, it’s nat’ral for people to ask witches this sort of thing on account of us bein’ suppositories of tradition, but the younger girls I see around don’t seem very keen on picking this sort of thing up, them being far too keen on candles and lucky crystals and so on. I reckon if a crystal’s so lucky, how come it’s ended up as a bit of rock? I don’t trust all this occult, you never know who had it last. (NOC)
'I don’t know how to do officering.’
‘No one knows how to do officering, Fred. That’s why they’re officers. If they knew anything, they’d be sergeants.' (FE) |
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