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After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if
you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way. (J)
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'Knowing things is magical, if other people don’t know them.' (HFS)
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. (NW)
Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass, and on that simple equation rests the whole of L-space. It is via L-space that all books are connected (quoting the ones before them, and influencing the ones that come after). But there is no time in L-space. Nor is there, strictly speaking, any space. Nevertheless, L-space is infinitely large and connects all libraries, everywhere and everywhen. It’s never further than the other side of the bookshelf, yet only the most senior and respected librarians know the way in. (SODW)
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library. (GG)
Leaders weren’t allowed not to know. (AM)
'You don't have to make it work, anyway. You have to stop it working. You don't need knowledge for that, you need ignorance. (GO)
... the Patrician was against printing, because if people knew too much it would only bother them. (J)
Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish
and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It’s a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. (H) '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.’
Treacle 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) 'They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.' (ER)
You never teach anyone else everything you know. (W)
They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one amongst them, she knew, who could mend a kettle. What they did was sell invisible things. And after they had sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but didn’t often want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t know it was locked.
‘I can’t do,’said Miss Tick, straightening up. ‘But I can teach!' (WFM) Education had been easy.
Learning things had been harder. Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. (H) There were lessons later on. These were going a lot better now she’d got rid of the reading books about bouncy balls and dogs called Spot. She’d got Gawain on to the military campaigns of General Tacticus, which were suitably bloodthirsty but, more importantly, considered too difficult for a child. As a result his vocabulary was doubling every week and he could already use words like ‘disembowelled’ in everyday conversation. After all, what was the point of teaching children to be children? They were naturally good at it. (H)
'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) The Faculty was lukewarm on the subject of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but they were boiling hot on the subject of warm bedrooms. (SODW)
It’s amazing what a child who is quiet and observant can learn, and this includes things people don’t think she is old enough to know. (WFM)
...books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the
world. (CJ) The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It
also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain. (SM) |
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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