The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

that didn’t mean to say she approved of it.
    *
    The old woman had a flat, measured way of speaking sometimes. It was the kind of voice the Creator had probably used. Whether there was magic in it, or just headology it ruled out any possibility of argument. It made it clear that whatever it was talking about was exactly how things should be.
    *
    The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked like, or even if there had ever been one.
    *
    Front doors in Bad Ass were used only by brides and corpses, and Granny had always avoided becoming either.
    *
    Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.
    *
    ‘Do you know how wizards like to be buried?’
    ‘Yes!’
    ‘Well, how?’
    Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs.
    ‘Reluctantly’
    *
    Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.
    *
    Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
    *
    ‘But,’ Smith said, ‘if it’s wizard magic she’s got, learning witchery won’t be any good, will it? You said they’re different.’
    ‘They’re both magic. 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.
    *
    Granny grinned. ‘That’s one form of magic, of course.’
    ‘What, just knowing things?’
    ‘Knowing things that other people don’t know.’
    *
    ‘Hoki’s a nature god,’ Granny said. ‘Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance.’
    *
    A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for you).

    No one can out-stare a witch, ’cept a goat, of course.

    Granny meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t.
    *
    He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays andbits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.
    *
    A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.

    If women were as good as men they’d be a lot better!

    The air around them reeked of incense and grain and spices and beer, but mainly of the sort of smell that was caused by a high water-table, thousands of people, and a robust approach to drainage.
    *
    The Shades: an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.
    *
    The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbours.
    *
    At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. 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. By some little understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage - even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.
    *
    It wasn’t that Granny could make herself invisible, it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the foreground so that she wasn’t noticed.
    *
    Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic with a mind of its own …
    One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back,