The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,84

her.

‘I had a lot of voles last night,’ said Mistress Weatherwax over her shoulder.

‘Yes, but you didn’t actually eat them, did you?’ said Tiffany. ‘It was the owl that actually ate them.’

‘Technic’ly yes,’ Mistress Weatherwax admitted. ‘But if you think you’ve been eating voles all night you’d be amazed how much you don’t want to eat anything next morning.’

For an old woman Mistress Weatherwax could move quite fast. She strode over the moors as if distance was a personal insult.

There were no judges, and no prizes. The Witch Trials weren’t like that, as Petulia had said. The point was to show what you could do, to show what you’d become, so that people would go away thinking things like ‘That Caramella Bottlethwaite, she’s coming along nicely’. It wasn’t a competition, honestly. No one won.

And if you believed that you’d believe that the moon is pushed around the sky by a goblin called Wilberforce.

*

‘If you don’t know when to be a human being, you don’t know when to be a witch. And if you’re too afraid of goin’ astray, you won’t go anywhere.’

*

‘I’m clever enough to know how you manage not to think of a pink rhinoceros if someone says “pink rhinoceros”,’ she managed to say aloud.

‘Ah, that’s deep magic, that is,’ said Granny Weatherwax.

‘No. It’s not. You don’t know what a rhinoceros looks like, do you?’

Sunlight filled the clearing as the old witch laughed, as clear as a downland stream.

‘That’s right!’ she said.

MOIST von Lipwig is a con artist on …

… an and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork’s ailing postal service back on its feet.

It’s a tough decision.

But he’s got to see that the mail gets through, come rain, hail, sleet, dog the Post Office Workers’ Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer killer.

Getting a date with Adora Belle Dearheart would be nice, too.

They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.

*

‘I’d get some rest if I was you, sir, ‘cos we’re hanging you in half an hour,’ said Mr Wilkinson.

‘Hey, don’t I get breakfast?’

‘Breakfast isn’t until seven o’clock, sir.’

*

‘I’m offering you a job, Mr Lipwig, that of Postmaster General of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. The job, Mr Lipwig, involves the refurbishment and running of the city’s postal service, preparation of the international packets, maintenance of Post Office property, et cetera, et cetera—’

‘If you stick a broom up my arse I could probably sweep the floor, too,’ said Moist.

Lord Vetinari gave him a long, long look.

‘Well, if you wish,’ he said, and turned to a hovering clerk. ‘Drumknott, does the housekeeper have a store cupboard on this floor, do you know?’

*

‘I believe in freedom, Mr Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.’

*

The world was blessedly free of honest men, and wonderfully full of people who believed they could tell the difference between an honest man and a crook.

He had a beard of the short bristled type that suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.

A large black and white cat had walked into the room.

‘That’s Mr Tiddles, sir,’ said Groat.

‘Tiddles?’ said Moist. ‘You mean that really is a cat’s name? I thought it was just a joke.’

‘Not so much a name, sir, more of a description,’ said Groat.

*

Before you could sell glass as diamonds you had to make people really want to see diamonds. That was the trick, the trick of all tricks. You changed the way people saw the world. You let them see it the way they wanted it to be …

*

Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing lacked style and anyway was bad for business, habit-forming and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by

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