Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do. (RM)
Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off any more clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No spectres haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids.
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do. (RM)
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'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)
When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch.*
*Sometimes, of course, to say, ‘Please stop doing it.' (CJ) ... Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it’d save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful. (LL)
Witches would prefer to cut enemies dead with a look. There was no sense in killing your enemy. How would she know you’d won? (W)
Cats are like witches. They don’t fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There’s no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won’t know they’ve lost, and to be real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows
it. There’s no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure. (WA) 'Nothing wrong with being self-assertive,’ said Nanny. ‘Self-asserting’s what witching’s all about.’
‘I never said there was anything wrong with it,’ said Granny. ‘I told her there was nothing wrong with it. You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you’re told.' (WA) People had seen her turn into a screaming, green-skinned monster. They could respect a witch like that. Once you got respect, you’d got everything. (W)
... gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human
fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches. (ER) 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)
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)
'They think I can see into their hearts, but no witch can do that. Not without surgery, at least.' (W)
First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second
Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right. (W) People say things like ‘listen to your heart’, but witches learn to listen with other things too. It’s amazing what your kidneys can tell you. (WFM)
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)
'Cackling', to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were negotiable. (W)
... it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ... (W)
It wasn’t that witches were actually dishonest, but they were careful about what kind of truth they told. (W)
'… for a witch there are no happy endings. There are just endings.' (W)
…the real purpose of a coven was to meet friends, even if they were friends simply because they were really the only people you could talk to freely as they had the same problems and would understand what you were moaning about. (W)
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)
'I am a teacher as well as a witch,’ said Miss Tick, adjusting her hat carefully. 'Therefore I make lists. I make assessments. I write things down in a neat, firm hand with pens of two colours.' (WFM)
'We look to…the edges,’ said Mistress Weatherwax. ‘There’s a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong…an’ they need watchin’. We watch ‘em, we guard the sum of things. And we never ask for any reward. That’s important.' (WFM)
... one of the things a witch did was stand right on the edge, where the decisions had to be made. You made them so that others didn’t have to, so that others could even pretend to themselves that there were no decisions to be made, no little secrets, that things just happened. (CJ)
'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) |
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