The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,6

on his staff of power to the eighth son of an eighth son. Unfortunately for his colleagues in the chauvinistic (not to say misogynistic) world of magic, he failed to check on the new-born baby’s sex…

The Discworld is …

… as round and flat as a geological pizza, although without the anchovies.

*

He came walking through the thunderstorm and you could tell he was a wizard, partly because of the long cloak and carven staff but mainly because the raindrops were stopping several feet from his head, and steaming.

*

There was a village tucked in a narrow valley between steep woods. 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.

*

Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all gynaecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall.

*

Granny Weatherwax 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.

*

Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn’t hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.

*

Although she was aware that somewhere under her complicated strata of vests and petticoats there was some skin, 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