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The Witches of Lancre


(illustration by Paul Kidby)

First, a disclaimer. All quotes on this page belong to Terry Pratchett and his characters. For I do
believe that even those who are labeled fictional characters have a life, first in their creator,
who gives them that life, then in their readers, who allow them to continue that life.
These words belong as much to Rincewind, Ponder, Granny Weatherwax, and all the others
as much as they belong to the one who first wrote them.

Terry Pratchett says that the ideal size for a coven of witches is one. Fortunately,
the one in the mountain community of Lancre has grown a bit larger, although not without constant
bickering because of it. The maid, the mother, and.... the other one, as they are
frequently called; Magrat (and later Perdita when Magrat finds herself in a new role in the kingdom),
Nanny Ogg, and Granny Weatherwax. This is the series which you most frequently
find yourself pausing to reflect on the obvious truth that Pratchett presents, most often in the words and
thoughts of Granny Weatherwax.

On that note... there's a badger in the privy.

 

Equal Rites

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.



"They say there's dwarf mines under the Ramtops," she said inconsequentially. "My, but them little buggers is in for a surprise."
-- Granny reflects on Esk's methods of lighting a fire.

 

It wasn't a large village, and wouldn't have shown up on a map of the mountains. It barely showed up on a map of the village.

 

The midwife's name was Granny Weatherwax. She was a witch. That was quite acceptable in the Ramtops, and no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.

 

"If you don't want me to come then I'll come," [Esk] said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.

 

[Granny] understood babies. You put milk in one and and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves.

 

Well? Who says women can't be wizards?
Granny hesitated. The tree might as well have asked why fish couldn't be birds. ... She knew a cutting, incisive, withering and above all a self-evident answer existed. It was just that, to her extreme annoyance, she couldn't quite bring it to mind.


Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew; there was "goat who is my kid," "goat who is my mother," "goat who is herd leader," and half a dozen other names not least of which was "goat who is this goat." They had a complicated herd system and four stomachs and a digestive system that sounded very busy on still nights, and Granny had always felt that calling all this names like Buttercup was an insult to a noble animal.

 

"If you can't learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse."
"What's an elephant?"
"A kind of badger," said Granny. She hadn't maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.

 

On the way home Granny met a hungry bear. Granny's back was giving her gyp, and she was in no mood to be growled at. She muttered a few words under her breath and the bear, to its brief amazement, walked heavily into a tree and didn't regain consciousness for several hours.

 

[Esk] loved her brothers, when she reminded herself to, in a dutiful sort of way, although she generally remembered them as a collection of loud noises in trousers.

 

"You said there was some sort of teaching place?" he hazarded.
"The Unseen University, yes. It's for training wizards."
"And you know where it is?"
"Yes," lied Granny, whose grasp of geography was slightly worse than her knowledge of subatomic physics.

 

Granny had warned [Esk] at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was now determined to see one or two of them for herself.

 

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them.
Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head...


Fossils were well-known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene.

 

It's a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink.

 

It seemed logical to Esk that among all these books should be one that told you how to read all the others. She wasn't sure how to find it, but deep in her soul she felt it would probably have pictures of cheerful rabbits and happy kittens on the cover.

 

Simon: "They do say the pen is mightier than the sss--"
Esk: "--sword. All right, but which would you rather be hit with?"

 

Two of them reached out hairy hands and grabbed Granny's shoulders. Her arm disappeared behind her back and there was a brief flurry of movement that ended with the men hopping away, clutching bits of themselves and swearing.
"Hatpin," said Granny.

 

The Thing lurched uncertainly above her. Esk's eyes narrowed. She put the world down very carefully, hit the Thing very hard around the point where its shins would be, if there were shins under that cloak, and picked up the world again in one neat movement.

 

"And where is this staff now?"
"She said she threw it in the river..."
Cutangle shook his head. "The river's flooding," he said. "It's a million-to-one chance."
Granny smiled grimly. It was the sort of smile that wolves ran away from. Granny gripped her brookstick purposefully.
"Million-to-one chances," she said, "crop up nine times out of ten."

 

"Magic can be a sort of door, and there are unpleasant Things on the other side. Do you understand?"
The smith nodded. He didn't really understand, but he correctly surmised that if he revealed this fact Granny would start going into horrible details.

 

They peered up at their sister with a mixture of fascination and scorn. Witches and wizards were objects of awe, but sisters weren't. Somehow, knowing your own sister was learning to be a witch sort of devalued the whole profession.


Granny Weatherwax: "That's one form of magic, of course."
Esk: "What, just knowing things?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Knowing things that other people don't know."

 

"Men's minds work different from ours, see. Their magic's all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It's all power. It's all--" Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, "--jommetry."

 

"What?" he said.
"Milk," said the child, still focussing furiously. "You get it out of goats. You know?"
Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats.

 

It didn't occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn't about to act ungrateful.

 

One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape; since then he had hresisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orang-outan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from.

 

"If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune?"
"Can't girls seek their fortune?"
"I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune."

 

...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.

 

"Granny," said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their wayward elders. "I don't think you quite understand. I don't want to hit the ground. It's never done anything to me."

 

Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving the impression of a beginners' ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well.


...[Granny] was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.

 

Sometimes wizards were thin and gaunt and talked to animals (the animals didn't listen, but it's the thought that counts).

 

The great doors of Unseen University are made of octiron, a metal so unstable that it can only exist in a universe saturated with raw magic. They are impregnable to all force save magic: no fire, no battering ram, no army can breach them.
Which is why most ordinary visitors to the University use the back door, which is made of perfectly normal wood and doesn't go around terrosing people, or even stand still terrorising people.


"City folks are always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food."

 

Cutangle: "It's never happened before."
Granny Weatherwax: "Lots of things have never happened before. We're only born once."

 

Wyrd Sisters

The calender of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.


On nights such as these the gods, as has already been pointed out, play games other than chess with the fates of mortals and the thrones of kings. It is important to remember that they always cheat, right up to the end.

 

In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven't got the imagination. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

 

Like most people -- most people, at any rate, below the age of sixty or so -- Verence hadn't exercised his mind much about what happened to you when you died. Like most people since the dawn of time, he assumed it all somehow worked out all right in the end.
And, like most people since the dawn of time, he was now dead.

 

Every morning [Magrat's] hair was long, thick, and blond, but by the evening it had always returned to its normal worried frizz. To ameliorate the effect she had tried to plait violets and cowslips in it. The result was not all she had hoped. It gave the impression that a window box had fallen on her head.

 

The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow. [Footnote: All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.]

 

Tradition said that there could only be three questions. Granny tried to formulate one that couldn't be deliberately misunderstood. Then she decided that this was playing the wrong kind of game.
"What the hell's going on?" she said carefully. "And no mucking about trying to wriggle out of it, otherwise I'll boil you."

 

Greebo was one of [Nanny Ogg's] blind spots.While intellectually she would concede that he was indeed a fat, cunning, evil-smelling multiple rapist, she nevertheless instinctively pictured him as the small fluffy kitten he had been decades before. The fact that he had once chased a female wolf up a tree and seriously surprised a she-bear who had been innocently digging for roots didn't stop her worrying that something bad might happen to him.

 

Greebo's grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the opposite way around.

 

The duke often mused on his good luck in marrying her. If it wasn't for the engine of her ambition he'd be just another local lord, with nothing much to do but hunt, drink, and exercise his droit de seigneur.*
[Footnote: Whatever that was. He'd never found anyone prepared to explain it to him.But it was definitely something a feudal lord ought to have and, he was pretty sure, it needed regular exercise. He imagined it was some kind of large hairy dog. he was definitely going to get one, and damn well exercise it.]

 

Granny nodded, and fished in the deepest recesses of her cloak. At last she produced a small leather bag, which she tipped out on to the table. There was a lot of silver, and even a few gold coins.
"That should take care of--" she groped-- "nappies and suchlike. Clothes and things. Whatever."
"A hundred times over, I should think," said Vitoller weakly. "Why didn't you mention this before?"
"If I'd had to buy you, you wouldn't be worth the price."

 

Granny's implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occassion, mountains.

 

Occupying the metterforical stalls were a rabble of rabits, weasels, vermine, badgers, foxes, and miscellaneous creatures who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk.

 

First, she had to find out his name. The old peel-the-apple trick should do that. You just peeled an apple, getting one length of peel, and threw the peel behind you; it'd land in the shape of his name. Millions of girls had tried it and had inevitably been disappointed, unless the loved one was called Scscs.

 

[Nanny Ogg] gave the guards a nod as she went through. It didn't occur to either of them to stop her because witches, like beekeepers and big gorillas, went where they liked. In any case, an elderly lady banging a bowl with a spoon was probably not the spearhead of an invasion force.

 

All the Disc it is but an Theater, ane alle men and wymmen are but Players. Except Those who selle popcorn.

 

Only once, in the entire history of witchery on the Ramtops, had a thief broken into a witch's cottage. The witch concerned visited the most terrible punishment on him.
[Footnote: She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she'd smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.]


A year went past. The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn't worked.

 

"A magic sword is important," said Magrat. "You've got to have one. We could make him one," she added wistfully, "out of thunderbolt iron. I've got a spell for that. You take some thunderbolt iron," she said uncertainly, "and then you make a sword out of it."

 

"I'd like to know if I could compare you to a summer's day. Because -- well, June 12th was quite nice, and..."

 

Granny Weatherwax sighed. "Each to her own, I suppose. I'm blowed if I'll let a ball of shiny rock tell me what to do."
"Yes, bugger all that." said Nanny. "Let's curse somebody."

 

The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.
In summer she used it as a beer cooler.

 

In the village of Razorback a cat gave birth to a two-headed kitten, but since Greebo, by dint of considerable effort, was every male ancestor for the last thirty generations this probably wasn't all that portentous.

 

"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."

 

Hour gongs were being struck all across the city and night-watchmen were proclaiming that it was indeed midnight and also that, in the face of all the evidence, all was well. Many of them got as far as the end of the sentence before being mugged.

 

Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

 

Witches Abroad

Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.


The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match.

 

Magrat was annoyed. She was also frightened, which made her even more annoyed. It was hard for people when Magrat was annoyed. It was like being attacked by damp tissue.

 

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage."

 

Greebo's technique was unscientific and wouldn't have stood a chance against any decent swordmanship, but on his side was the fact that it is almost impossible to develop decent swordmanship when you seem to have run into a food mixer that is biting your ear off.


Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Yabi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Yabi are renowned for being remarkably short and bad-tempered.

 

"Grassy ass!"
(Nanny Ogg showing her ability to speak foreign languages to say Thank You)

 

Just superstition. But superstition doesn't have to be wrong.

 

"Tell me," Magrat said, "you said your mummy knows about the big bad wolf in the woods, didn't you?"
"That's right."
"But nevertheless she sent you out by yourself to take those goodies to your granny."
"That's right. Why?"
"Nothing. Just thinking."

 

Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occassionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

 

"[Magrat] said she wanted to relate to herself."
"That's what I said," said Granny Weatherwax. "I told her: Simplicity Garlick was your mother, Araminta Garlick was your granny. Yolande Garlick is your aunt and you're your ... you're your me."
She sat back with the satisfied look of someone who has solved everything anyone could ever want to know about a personal identity crisis.

 

To Nanny Ogg, Greebo was still the cute little kitten that chased balls of wool around the floor.
To the rest of the world he was an enormous tomcat, a parcel of incredibly indestructive life forces in a skin that looked less like a fur than a piece of bread that had been left in a damp place for a fortnight.

 

Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.

 

Magrat unfolded a map. ... "I think we're here," she said.
"My word," said Nanny Ogg, whose grasp of the principles of cartography was even shakier than Granny's. "Amazing how we can all fit on that little bit of paper."

 

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 a 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.

 

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

 

"Good and bad is tricky," said said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face."

 

[The waterfall] was the second highest anywhere on the Disc and had been discovered in the Year of the Revolving Crab by the noted explorer Guy de Yoyo [Footnote: Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters, and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren't explorers and didn't count.]

 

"What shall I do, then?" said Granny Weatherwax suspiciously.
""Oh ... well ... there ought to be someone to, you know, welcome people onto the stick and give them their meals," said Magrat. "And tell them what to do if the magic fails, for example."
"If the magic fails everyone'll crash into the ground and die," Granny pointed out.

 

"It's a big responsibility, fairy godmothering. Knowing when to stop, I mean. People whose wishes get granted often don't turn out to be very nice people. So should you give them what they want -- or what they need?"

 

The four witches stared gloomily at the fire. Well, three of them did. Nanny Ogg, who tended to look on the cheerful side, made toast.

 

"Look at the three of you," she said. "Bursting with inefficient good intentions. The maiden, the mother, and the crone."
"Who are you calling a maiden?" said Nanny Ogg.
"Who are you calling a mother?" said Magrat.
Granny Weatherwax glowered briefly like the person who has discovered that there is only one straw left and everyone else has drawn a long one.

 

"And when the big ole troll that lives under Broken Mountain came down for help because his wife was sick and everyone threw rocks at him, I remember it was Esme that went back with him and delivered the baby. Hah ... then when old Chickenwire Hopkins threw a rock at Esme a little while afterwards all his barns was mysteriously trampled flat in the night. She always said you can't help people with magic, but you can help them with skin. By doin' real things, she meant."

 

It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

 

Anywey one good thing is the drink here is v. cheap theres this one called a Bananana dakry which is basicly Rum with a banananana in it.
[Footnote: Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling "banana," but didn't know how you stopped.]

 

"Besides," said Magrat virtuously, "it can't be bad if we're doing it. We're the good ones."
"Oh yes, so we is," said Granny, "and there was me forgetting it for a minute there."

 

It had occurred to [Nanny Ogg] that a husband who was a man all night and a frog all day might be almost acceptable; you wouldn't get the wage packet, but there'd be less wear and tear on the furniture. She also couldn't put out of her mind certain private speculations about the length of his tongue.

 

After twenty-five minutes [Granny Weatherwax] was down one dollar and Mister Frank was sweating. Granny had already helpfully pointed out three times that he'd accidentally dealt cards off the bottom of the deck, and she'd asked for another pack "because, look, this one's got all little marks on the back."

 

"I spoke to the King," said the voice.
"And what did he say?" said Granny expectantly.
"He said, 'Oh, no! Not on top of everything else!'"
Granny beamed. "I knew 'e would have heard of me," she said.

 

"What some people need," said Magrat, to the world in general, "is a bit more heart."
"What some people need," said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, "is a lot more brain."
What I need, thought Nanny Ogg fervently, is a drink.

 

Little Girl: "You're not the wicked witch, are you?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Me? No. We're -- we're--"
Magrat: "Fairies."
Little Girl: "Only my mummy warned me about the wicked witch too. What kind of fairies?"
Magrat: "Er, flower fairies? Look, I've got a wand--"
Little Girl: "Which ones?"
Magrat: "What?"
Little Girl: "Which flowers?"
Magrat: "Er. Well. I'm ... Fairy Tulip and that's ... Fairy ... Daisy ... and this is..."
Nanny Ogg: "Fairy Hedgehog."

 

"It's only a folk song, Esme," said Nanny Ogg.
"Hah!" said Granny Weatherwax. "I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about ... about cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about ... about something else entirely."


"You can't make happiness ... All you can do is make an ending."

 

Granny Weatherwax: "The very next place we see, we're goin' in. What's that inn over there?"
Nanny Ogg: "Hotel ... No ... Va ... cancies. Hotel Nova Cancies. That means 'new, er, Cancies' in foreign."

 

It had taken many years under the tutelage of Granny Weatherwax for Magrat to learn that the common kitchen breadknife was better than the most ornate of magical knives. It could do all that the magical knife could do, plus you could also use it to cut bread.

 

A caring parent would have spelled Margaret correctly. And then she could have been a Peggy, or a Maggie -- big, robust names, full of reliability. There wasn't much you could do with a Magrat. It sounded like something that lived in a hole in a river bank and was always getting flooded out.

 

Nanny kicked her red boots together idly.
"Well, I suppose there's no place like home," she said.
"No," said Granny Weatherwax, still looking thoughtful. "No. There's a billion places like home. But only one of 'em's where you live."

 


Lords and Ladies


There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings.
The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired... [Footnote: Probably at the first pawn.]

 

The Librarian looked out at the jolting scenery. He was sulking. This had a lot to do with the new bright collar around his neck with the word "PONGO" on it. Someone was going to suffer for this.

 

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

 

The chieftain had been turned into a pumpkin although, in accordance with the rules of universal humour, he still had his hat on.

 

The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn't bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books.

 

Greebo always slept on Nanny's bed; the way he'd affectionately try to claw your eyeballs out in the morning was as good as an alarm clock. But she always left a window open at night in case he wanted to go out and disembowel something, bless him.

 

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves aer fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

 

"Any relation to Sobriety Ogg?"
"He was my dad, sir."
"Good grief. Old Sobriety's son? How is the old devil?"
"Dunno, sir, what with him being dead."
"Oh dear. How long ago?"
"These past thirty years," said Shawn.
"But you don't look any older than twen--" Ponder began. Ridcully elbowed him sharply in the ribcage.
"This is the countryside," he hissed. "People do things differently here. And more often."

 

So that was all settled, then. Not a proposal, just a statement. She hadn't been quite sure how the moment would be, even in the darkest hours of the night, but she'd had an idea that roses and sunsets and bluebirds might just possibly be involved. Clover had not figured largely. Beans and other leguminous nitrogen fixers were not a central figure.

 

"Well, I'm not going," said the Dean. "It's unnatural, the countryside. Far too many trees."

 

Herme was the god of the chased and the hunted and all small animals whose ultimate destiny is to be an abrupt damp squeak.

 

"Good morrow, brothers, and wherehap do we whist this merry day?" said Carter the baker.
The rest of the Lancre Morris Men looked at him.
"You on some kind of medication or what?" said Weaver the thatcher.

 

"It was all fifty or sixty years ago!" said Granny. "You can't suddenly turn up and say all those years haven't happened."
"Oh, I know they've happened all right," said Ridcully. "I'm the head wizard now. I've only got to give an order and a thousand wizards will ... uh ... disobey, come to think of it, or say 'What?', or start to argue."

 

It's not enough to be able to pick up a sword. You have to know which end to poke into the enemy.

 

Magrat: "I remember a folksong about a situation just like this. This girl had her fiance stolen by the Queen of Elves and she didn't hang around whining, she jolly well got on her horse and went and rescued him. Well, I'm going to do that too."
Jason: "You're going to sing?"

 

"I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in trouble."
"But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg.
"That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em."

 

The Carter parents were a quiet and respectable Lancre family who got into a bit of a mix-up when it came to naming their children. First, they had four daughters, who were christened Hope, Chastity, Prudence and Charity, because naming girls after virtues is an ancient and unremarkable tradition. Then their first son was born and out of some misplaced idea about how this naming business was done he was called Anger Carter, followed later by Jealousy Carter, Bestiality Carter and Covetousness Carter.


"Do you ever wonder what life would have been like if you'd said yes?" said Ridcully.
"No."
"I suppose we'd have settled down, had children, grandchildren, that sort of thing..."
"What about the fire?" she said.
"What fire?"
"Swept through our house just after we were married. Killed us both."
"What fire? I don't know anything about any fire?"
Granny turned around.
"Of course not! It didn't happen. But the point is, it might have happened. 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."


[Ponder] turned to the others with the agonized expression of a man who has the whole great whirring machinery of the Universe to dismantle and only a bent paper-clip to do it with.

 

For Magrat, stepping into a man's bedroom was like an explorer stepping on to that part of the map marked Here Be Dragons.

 

"But look," said Ponder, "the graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely."
"Oook."
"What'd he say?" said the Bursar, passing briefly through reality on his way somewhere else.
"I think he said, 'Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody'," said Ponder.


Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

 

"This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here."

 

No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles].

 

A heap of discarded garments by the bed suggested that Verence had mastered the art of hanging up clothes as practised by half the population of the world, and that he had equally had difficulty with the complex topological manoeuvres necessary to turn the socks the right way out.

 

 

Maskerade

She'd even given herself a middle initial - X - which stood for "someone who has a cool and exciting middle name".

 

She'd never dared tell anyone that she'd like her full name to be Perdita X Dream. They just wouldn't understand. They'd say things like: if you think that's the right name for you, why have you still got two shelves full of soft toys?

 

"Books've got to have a name on 'em so's everyone knows who's guilty."

 

"Er, excuse me," said the man as Nanny Ogg turned away, "but what is that on your shoulders?"
"It's ... a fur collar," said Nanny.
"Excuse me, but I jsut saw it flick its tail."
"Yes. I happen to believe in beauty without cruelty."

 

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.


[Granny Weatherwax had] faced wizards, monsters, and elves ... and now she was feeling pleased with herself because she'd fooled Jarge Weaver, a man who'd twice failed to become Village Idiot through being overqualified.

 

...the Lancre postal service consisted of taking the mailbag off the nail where the coach left it and delivering it to the outlying homesteads when he had a moment, although many citizens were in the habit of going down to the sack and rummaging until they found some mail they liked.

 

[The Librarian's] lunchtime recitals in the Great Hall of Unseen University were extremely popular, especially since the University's organ had every single sound-effect that Bloody Stupid Johnson's inverted genius had been able to contrive. No one would have believed, before a pair of simian hand worked on the project, that something like Doinov's romantic Prelude in G could be rescored for Whoopee Cushion and Squashed Rabbits.

 

Bergholt Stuttley ("Bloody Stupid") Johnson was Ankh-Morpork's most famous, or rather most notorious, inventor. He was reknowned for never letting his number-blindness, his lack of any skill whatsoever or his complete failure to grasp the essence of a problem stand in the way of his cheerful progress as the first Counter-Renaissance man.

 

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.

 

Lancre had always bred strong, capable women. A Lancre farmer needed a wife who'd think nothing of beating a wolf to death with her apron when she went out to get some firewood.

 

"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.


"You might think a production like Lohenshaak is full of passion, but it's a sandpit of toddlers compared to what goes on behind the scenes. The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case, and that's only the start of it..."

 

Without Magrat, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax got on one another's nerves. With her, all three had been able to get on the nerves of absolutely everyone else in the whole world, which had been a lot more fun.

 

"What're we going to call him?" said Granny. "He can't just be Greebo, which I've always said was a damn silly name for a cat."
"Well, he looks aristocratic--" Nanny began.
"He looks like a beautiful brainless bully," Granny corrected her.
"Aristocratic," repeated Nanny.
"Same thing."

 

A man was theoretically sweeping. What he was in fact doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.

 

COURAGE IS EASY BY CANDLELIGHT. YOUR FAITH, I SUSPECT, IS IN THE FLAME.
Death grinned.
Granny leaned forward and blew out the candle. Then she folded her arms again and stared fiercely ahead of her.
After some length of time a voice said, ALL RIGHT, YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT.

 

They said love always found a way and, of course, so did a number of associated activities.


"...my father is the Emperor of Klatch and my mother is a small tray of raspberry puddings."
"That's interesting!" said Christine, who was looking at the mirror. "Do you think my hair looks right?!"

 

Christine's forehead wrinkled, as it tended to when she was contemplating a problem more complex than "What is your name?"


"What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man."

 

"Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. '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."

 

Carpe Jugulum

One or two of the old barrows had been exposed over the years, their huge stones attracting their own folklore. If you left your unshod horse at one of them overnight and placed sixpence on the stone, in the morning the sixpence would be gone and you'd never see your horse again, either...

 

When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch. [Footnote: Sometimes, of course, to say, "Please stop doing it."]

 

"There have to be rules, Mistress Weatherwax."
"And what's the first one that your Om requires, then?"
"That believers should worship n other god but Om," said Oats promptly.
"Oh yes? That's gods for you. Very self-centred, as a rule."


Usually the royal falconer was vainly fighting off his hawks, who attacked him for a pastime, and in the case of King Henry kept picking him up and dropping him again in the belief that he was a giant tortoise.

 

"And they'll be useful," Nanny added, lowering her voice. "Fighting's what they like best."
"Whist, yon fellaight fra' aquesbore!"
"Drinkin's what they like best," Nanny corrected herself.
"Nae, hoon a scullen!"
"Drinkin' and fightin's what they like best," said Nanny.
"An' snaflin' coobeastie."
"And stealing cows," said Nanny. "Drinkin', fightin' and stealin' cows is what they like best."


There are dozens of ways to [kill vampires], quite apart from the stake through the heart, which also works on normal people so if you have any stakes left over you don't have to waste them.

 

She was not, herself, hugely in favour of motherhood in general. Obviously it was necessary, but it wasn't exactly difficult. Even cats managed it. But women acted as if they'd been given a medal that entitled them to boss people around. It was as if, just because they'd got the label which said "mother," everyone else got a tiny part of the label that said "child"...

 

"...it's one thing saying you've got the best god, but sayin' it's the only real one is a bit of a cheek, in my opinion. I know where I can find at least two any day of the week."

 

They're going to kill the vampires, [Perdita] said, and the children will watch.
Good, thought Agnes, that's exactly right.
Perdita was horrified. It'll give them nightmares!
No, thought Agnes. It'll take the nightmares away. Sometimes everyone has to know the monster is dead, and remember, so that they can tell their grandchildren.

 

"But that's just a bit of superstition, isn't it? Witches don't have to come in threes."
"Oh, no. Course not," said Nanny. "You can have any number up to about, oh, four or five."
"What happens if there's more, then? Something awful?"
"Bloody great row, usually."

 

"Just as Om reached out his hand to save the prophet Brutha from the torture, so will he spread his wings over me in my time of trial," said Oats, but he sounded as though he was trying to reassure himself rather than Nanny. He went on: "I've got a pamphlet if you would like to know more," and this time the tone was much more positive, as if the existence of Om was a little uncertain whereas the existence of pamphlets was obvious to any open-minded rational-thinking person.


As [Agnes] tucked in her hair and observed herself critically in the mirror she sang a song. She sang in harmony. Not, of course, with her reflection in the glass, because that kind of heroine will sooner or later end up singing a duet with Mr. Blue Bird and other forest creatures and then there's nothing for it but a flamethrower.

 

Normally Igor wouldn't have wasted any time. But the family had been getting on his nerves, and he reacted in the traditional way of the put-upon servant by suddenly becoming very stupid.

 

The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches they gave you a bigger shovel.

 

They lined up and looked down into the new place and then, weapons waving, raised a battle cry. It would have been more impressive if they'd agreed on one before, but as it was it sounded as though every single small warrior had a battle cry of his very own and would fight anyone who tried to take it away from him.

 

"We are vampires. We cannot help what we are."
"Only animals can't help what they are," said Granny.