Pratchett, Terry

Jingo

Dedication – “To all the fighters for peace”
p.7 – “They exchanged a very brief glance which was nevertheless modulated with a considerable amount of information, beginning with the sheer galactic-sized embarrassment of having parents and working up from there.”
p.15 – “He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That’s where the things were that they hoped he didn’t know and didn’t want him to find out.”
p.17 – “There was a painful silence. Burleigh tried to fill it up, always a bad mistake.”
p.22 – “When you hear the bang, there’s no time to wonder how long the little fuse has been fizzing.”
p.26 – " ‘We have no ships. We have no men. We have no money, too,’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘Of course, we have the art of diplomacy. It is amazing what you can do with the right words.’ "
pp.30-31 – " ‘Indeed. Very…civic. As I’m sure you recall. It demonstrates the friendly alliance between the University and the civil government which, I may say, seems to consist of their promising to do anything we ask provided we promise not to ask them to do anything.’ "
p.43 – " ‘Please! We’re just robbers and thieves! We’re not bad men!’ "
pp. 46-47 – “Waifs and bloody strays, because normal people wouldn’t be coppers.”
p.50 – “It wasn’t the clap used by middlings to encourage underlings to applaud overlings. It had genuine enthusiasm behind it which was, somehow, worse.”
pp.54-55 – " ‘The only things I can suggest,’ she said, ‘is that women are quite often attracted to men who can make them laugh.’ "
p.55 – “Now there was an image from his youth. Funny how they hung around in the dark alleys of your brain and suddenly jumped out on you.”
p.58 – " ‘What for? We’re not at war with anyone. Hah! But we might go to war to keep some damn island that’s only useful in case we have to go to war, right?’ "
p.70 – “Feathers in my hat, Vimes thought glumly. And fancy tights. And a shiny breastplate. A breastplate shouldn’t be shiny. It sould be too dented to take a decent polish. And diplomatic talk? How should I know how to talk diplomatically?”
p.71 – “It wasn’t proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing.”
p.98 – “So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way.”
p.98 – “After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. you just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.”
p.143 – “No one could be so simple, no one could be so creatively dumb, without being very intelligent. It was like being an actor. Only a very good actor was any good at being a bad actor.”
p.145 – “Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out.”
p.157 – " ‘Fred, the finest tradition of the Watch is having a quiet smoke somewhere out of the wind at three a.m. Let’s not get carried away, eh?’ "
pp.162-163 – “Well, at least she knew he was never very far away, just somewhere where he was trying to do too much and run too fast and people were trying to kill him.”
p.165 – “The feeling crept over Vimes that Klatch was a very big place in which his city and the whole of the Sto Plains would be lost, and so there must be room in it for all kinds of peoples, including this short chap in the red fez who was practically vibrating with indignation.”
p.180 – “And he was once again impressed, in the same dark way, by the manner in which Rust dealt with the problem. He dealt with it by making it not be there.”
pp.194-195 – “He was humming under his breath, tunelessly, with the faraway look of preoccupation that means that some Big Thought has required the shutting down of all non-essential processes.”
p.199 – “Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs had gone on patrol. They weren’t sure why they were patrolling, and what they were supposed to do if they saw a crime, although many years of training had enabled them not to see some quite large crimes.”
p.214 – “You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think They were Us.”
p.233 – “And the Patrician was against printing because if people knew too much it would only bother them.”
p.236 – " ‘Odd thing, ain’t it… you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.’ "
pp.238-239 – " ‘Are we entirely ready, sir?’ said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means ‘We are not entirely ready, sir.’ "
p.248 – “He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed.”
p.283 – “He didn’t look angry. He was a man who had passed through the fires of anger and was now in some strange peaceful bay beyond them.”
p.297 – “There was one of those little hanging-by-a-thread moments, which might suddenly rock one way of the other into a gale of laughter or sudden death.”
p.298 – " ‘We kill merchants, we rob too much, they never come back. Dumb. We let them go, they get rich again, our sons rob them. Such is wisdom.’ "
p.300 –

" ‘So you think you’re fighting for you’re freedom?’ said Vimes."
“Jabbar hesitated, and looked at Carrot. There was a brief exchange in Klatchian. Then Carrot said: ‘That’s a rather difficult question for a D’reg, sir. You see, their word for ‘freedom’ is the same as their word for ‘fighting.’ ‘”
“‘They certainly make their language do a lot of work, don’t they …?’”

p.305 – “When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.”
p.311 – “Colon had always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them go out and die famously for god, country and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made. It had never occurred to him that they might do it because they’d get yelled at if they didn’t.”
p.312 – “The docks of Al-Khali were like docks everywhere, because all docks everywhere are connected. Men have to put things on and off boats. There are only a limited number of ways to do this.”
p.328 – " ‘I love him because he’s kind without thinking about it. He doesn’t watch his own thoughts like other people do. When he does good things it’s because he’s decided to do them, not because he’s trying to measure up to something.’ "
p.340 – “The survival instinct cut in again. Stagger around backward, it said. So he staggered around backward, waving his legs in the air. Fall down heavily it said. So he sat down,…”
p.341 – “Of course there was going to be a trick. There always was a trick. But you watched it, in order to see a trick done well.”
p.358 – “Once again, laughter dispelled doubt.”
p.372 – " ‘I commend your city, commander. For enough money, you can find someone to do anything.’ "
p.378 – " ‘He wants to start a war…’ Vimes had to open his mouth because otherwise there was no room to get his head around such a crazy idea."
p.387 – “He believed, along with General Tacticus, that courage, bravery and the indomitable human spirit were fine things which nevertheless tended to take second place to the combination of courage, bravery, the indomitable human spirit and a six-to-one superiority of numbers.”
p.387 – “It was a kind of magic. He told people they were good chaps, and they knew they weren’t good chaps, but the way he told it made them believe it for a while.”
p.389 – " ‘It only works around him,’ said Angua. ‘But it does work.’ "
p.411 – “We’re a very rich city, but we haven’t got any actual money. The wealth of Ankh-Morpork is in its people, we’re told.”
p.413 – " ‘Why don’t you take some well-earned rest, Sir Samuel? You are,’ Vetinari flashed on of his lightning-fast smiles, ‘a man of action. You deal in swords, and chases, and facts. Now, alas, it is the time for the men of words, who deal in promises and mistrust and opinions. For you the war is over.’ "
p.453 – “Still, the drawings of the statue looked good. And he’d seen what was going to go in the history books. Making history, it turned out, was quite easy. It was what got written down. It was as simple as that.”
p.455 – “There would be trouble later on. People would ask questions. But that was later on– for now, gloriously uncomplicated and wonderfully clean, and hopefully with never an end, under a clear sky, in a world untarnished… there was only the chase.”

Equal Rites

p.3 – “It was, in fact, one of those places that exist merely so that people can have come from them.”
p.6 – " ‘Don’t worry,’ said the wizard. ‘I’m quite looking forward to it, to tell you the truth. I’ve heard it’s quite painless.’ "
p.8 – " ‘I was foolish,’ said the voice in tones no mortal could hear. ‘I assumed the magic would know what it was doing.’ "
p.19 – " ‘I don’t think poeple can turn themselves into animals,’ said Esk, slowly."
p.20 – " ‘I don’t think magic works like that,’ said Esk. ‘You can’t just make things happen, there’s a sort of– like a seesaw thing, if you push one end down, the other end goes up…’ Her voice trailed off."
p.21 – “She stopped, surprised at herself. She knew what she meant. The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself.”
p.24 – " ‘Is she dead?’ asked Gulta, as if Esk was an expert in these things."
p.28 – " ‘Oh, bugger,’ she said. She wondered if it was worth trying to find Esk’s mind, but human minds were never so sharp and clear as animal minds and anyway the overmind of the forest itself made impromptu searching as hard as listening for a waterfall in a thunderstorm. But even without looking she could feel the packmind of the wolves, a sharp, rank feeling that filled the mouth with the taste of blood."
p.30 – “She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.”
p.31 – “Smith wasn’t absolutely sure that it was all right with him. But he was quite sure that his wife, like every other woman in the village, held Granny Weatherwax in solemn regard, even in awe, and that if he started to object he would rapidly get out of his depth.”
p.34 – “The important thing, my girl, is to know what magic is for and what it isn’t for. And you can take it from me, it was never intended for lighting fires, you can be absolutely certain of that.”
p.34 – " ‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege."
p.35 – “Of course, when she was younger she thought nothing of it, running with the stags, hunting with the foxes, learning the strange dark ways of the moles, hardly spending a night in her own body. But it was getting harder now, especially coming back. Maybe the time would come when she couldn’t get back, maybe the body back home would be so much dead flesh, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad way of it, at that.”
p.37 – “She knew that 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.”
p.39 – “Wizards! They talked too much and pinned spells down in books like butterflies but, worst of all, they thought theirs was the only magic worth practicing.”
p.41 – “Presently the chair began to rock, of its own accord. It was the only sound in a silence that thickened and spread and filled the room like a terrible dark fog.”
pp.42-43 – “In the Ramtops witches were accorded a status similar to that which other cultures gave to nuns, or tax collectors, or cesspit cleaners. That is to say, they were respected, sometimes admired, generally applauded for doing a job which logically had to be done, but people never felt quite comfortable in the same room with them.”
p.44 – " ‘…and if she doesn’t control it, then there are Those who will control her. Magic can be a sort of door, and there are unpleasant Things on the other side. Do you understand?’ "
p.45 – “And so, as the winter turned and started the long, reluctant climb toward spring, Esk spent days at a time with Granny Weatherwax, learning witchcraft. It seemed to consist mainly of things to remember. The lessons were quite practical.”
p.46 – " ‘But it’s not magic!’ ‘Most magic isn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s just knowing the right herbs, and learning to watch the weather, and finding out the ways of the animals. And the way of people, too.’ "
p.50 – " ‘It’s a witch’s hat because you wear it. But you’re a witch because you wear the hat. Um.’ "
p.50 – " ‘So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you’re a witch and that’s why your magic works?’ said Esk. ‘That’s right,’ said Granny. ‘It’s called headology.’ "
p.50 – " ‘Listen,’ said Granny, ‘If you give someone a bottle of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if you wanit to work for sure then you let their mind make it work for them. Tell ’em it’s moonbeams bottled in fairy wine or something. Mumble over it a bit. It’s the same with cursing.’ "
p.53 – " ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s quite enough troubles around here without going to look for them in forn parts.’ "
p.55 – “Its mind was small, sharp, and purple, like an arrowhead.”
p.56 – “It was still totally oblivious to its passengers. She was genuinely impressed, a very rare occurence.”
p.64 – “Mind, of course, has no color, but nevertheless the strands of the eagle’s mind seemed to be purple. Around them and tangled among them were faint strands of silver.”
p.65 – “Granny was no stranger to the uses of power, but she knew she relied on gentle pressure subly to steer the tide of things. She didn’t put it like that, of course– she would have said that there was always a lever if you kenw where to look.”
p.65 – “There would be a price. And granny knew enough about wizardry to be certain that it would be a high one. But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?”
p.66 – “But now she could see where the strands ended, and where a judicious tug or push would begin to unravel them. It was so obvious she heard herself laugh, and the sound curved away in shades of orange and red and vanished into the ceiling.”
p.68 – " ‘You don’t understand! I couldn’t even remember my name!’ Esk shrieked."
p.68 – “Granny thought for a while. She always had to pause when conversations with Esk led her beyond the reaches of a decent person’s vocabulary.”
p.71 – " ‘I mean there’s no male witches, only silly men,’ said Granny hotly. ‘If men were witches, they’d be wizards. It’s all down to–’ she tapped her head ‘–headology.’ "
p.74 – “Granny was not entirely happy when faced with the world of letters. Her eyes protruded, her tongue stuck out, small beads of sweat formed on her forehead, but the pen scratched its way across the page to the accompaniment of the occasional quiet ‘drat’ or ‘bugger the thing.’ "
p.77 – “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.”
p.77 – “She 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.”
p.79 – “Esk gazed down defiantly. Granny glared up sternly. Their wills clanged like cymbals and the air between them thickened. But Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.”
p.82 – “But she was determined to see it through. A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.”
p.83 – “They all had one thing in common, though. No one approached it directly. They all sort of strolled almost past it, then suddenly ducked under its shady canopy. A moment later they would be back again, hand just darting away from bag or pocket, competing for the world’s Most Nonchalant Walk title so effectively that a watcher might actually doubt what he or she had just seen.” (Community, Observation, Pattern)
p.85 – " ‘Can’t stand the dark and fug myself,’ said Hilta Goatfounder, ‘but the customers expect it. You know how it is.’ " (Craftsmanship)
p.85 – “It was hard to describe. You couldn’t imagine them curtseying to anyone.” (Confidence, Identity)
p.87 – “Granny shifted uneasily. ‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘It’s all according. You just hold their hand and people do their own fortune telling. But there’s no need to go around believing it, we’d all be in trouble if we went around believing everything.’ " (Marketing, Thinking, Truth)
p.88 – “Hilta laughed. Esk quite liked the sound. Granny never laughed, she merely let the corners of her mouth turn up, but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.” (Joy)
p.97 – “There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband– and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.” (Art, Courage, Thinking)
pp.104-105 – “He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.”
p.106 – " ‘I would have thought one could carry out a perfectly respectable business, Hilta, without resorting to parlor tricks,’ said Granny, sitting down and beginning the long and tricky business of removing her hatpins.” (Business)
p.112 – " ‘Granny never likes to see people sitting around doing nothing,’ she offered. ‘She always says a girl who is good with her hands will never want for a living,’… " (Craftsmanship, Culture)
p.114 – “Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.” (Home, Loneliness)
p.114 – “He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.” (Culture, Independence?)
p.117 – “He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.”
p.117 – " ‘…I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.’ "
p.119 – “Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.” (Achievement)
p.120 – “One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.”
p.129 – “Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in teh clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image.”
p.132 – " ‘I’m not sure I like books,’ said Esk conversationally. ‘How can paper know things? My granny says books are only good if the paper is thin.’ "
p.135 – “He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalance and was as self-centered as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to.” (Courtesy/Respect, Character)
p.139 – “The fact is that the minds of wizards can give thoughts a shape.” (Thinking)
p.139 – “Strange Things circle and grunt outside the flimsy stockades of normality; there are weird hootings and howlings in the deep crevices at the edge of Time.” (Horror; Reality)
p.139 – “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, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow’s width away.” (Courage; Vision)
p.140 – “Esk had got used to them ever since that first dream after her first Borrowing, and familiarity had almost replaced terror.” (Courage; Craftsmanship; Practice)
p.143 – " ‘Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn’t always as people see it.’ " (Perspective; Truth)
p.145 – “Actually, there are some kinds of observers who, faced with all this beauty, will whine that you can’t have heavy light and certainly wouldn’t be able to see it, even if you could. To which one can only reply, so how come you’re standing on a cloud?” (Art; Perspective; Truth)
p.148 – “Granny had built a solid reputation on always knowing the answer to everything. Getting her to admit ignorance, even to herself, was an astonishing achievement. But the worm of curiosity was chewing at the apple of her mind.” (Confidence; Identity; Learning)
p.148 – " ‘I–I don’t know. I just had a picture of how I wanted things to be, and, and I, sort of– went into the picture.’ " (Craftmanship; Magic; Vocabulary)
p.150 – “The Shades, in brief, were an abode of discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and peddlers in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization’s axle.” (Community; Pragmatism; Reality (?))
p.151 – “She was at first annoyed, and then embarrassed, and then flattered; her clients had money, which was useful, but they also paid in respect, and that was a rock-hard currency.” (Business, Craftsmanship, Feelings)
p.151 – “Granny had counted the temples with a thoughtful look in her eyes; 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.” (Identity, Opportunity, Religion)
p.154 – “Behind them was a great rambling building, or buildings: it was hard to tell, because it didn’t look so much as if it had been designed as that a lot of buttresses, arches, towers, bridges, domes, cupolas and so forth had huddled together for warmth.” (Architecture, Community, Personification)
p.156 – “One felt that one would like to know their purpose, while at the same time suspecting that if you found out you would really prefer not to have done.” (Temptation)
pp.157-158 – “The designer had invested deeply in heavy locks, curly hinges, brass studs and an intricately carved archway to make it absolutely clear to anyone entering that they were not very important people at all.” (Architecture, Ego, Symbolism)
p.161 – “In fact it seemed to Esk that the shape had been there all the time, waiting for her eyes to see it, in the same way that a perfectly innovent cloud can suddenly become, without changing in any way, a whale or a ship or a face.”
p.164 – " ‘He says it’s just words to make his mind work properly,’ said Treatle, and shrugged. ‘I can’t understand half of what he says and that’s a fact. He says he’s having to invent words because there aren’t any for the things he’s doing.’ " (Craftsmanship, Thinking, Vocabulary)
p.171 – “Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it. It was a different matter if people who ought to know better did it, though. She considered that the future was a frail enough thing at best, and if people looked at hard they changed it.”
p.177 – " ‘Well, waht did you expect?’ she asked. ‘At least they only laughed at you. Laughter don’t hurt. You walked up to the chief wizard and showed off in front of everyone and only got laughed at? You’re doing well, you are. Have you eaten the sweet?’ " (Belonging, Doubt, Shame)
p.179 – “Granny wasn’t quite certain what she should do about it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She wondered whether, in her heart of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them, but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.” (Doubt, Parenting)
p.180 – “Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started working on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned.” (Crafsmanship, Systems, Vocabulary)
p.183 – “She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized(fossils were well known on the Discworld, great spiraled 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). And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.”
pp.185-186 – “Sometimes he seemed to be saying that nothing existed unless people thought it did, and the world was really only there at all because people kept on imagining it. But then he seemed to be saying that there was lots of worlds, all nearly the same and all sort of occupying the same place but all separated by the thickness of a shadow so that everything that ever could happen would have somewhere to happen in.”
p.188 – “She was also coming to the conclusion that she ought to learn to read. This reading business seemed to be the key to wizard magic, which was all about words. Wizards seemed to that names were the same as things, and that if you changed the name, you changed the thing. At least, it seemed to be something like that…”
p.190 – " ‘Well, you’re going your own way,’ said Granny. ‘Wherever that is.’ "
p.191 – “Spells have power, and merely writing them down and shoving them between covers doesn’t do anything to reduce it. The stuff leaks. Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic with a mind of its own.”
p.193 – “She felt alone, and lost, and more than a little betrayed. Everyone seemed to be busy living their own lives, except her. She would spend the rest of her life cleaning up after wizards. It wasn’t fair, and she’d had enough.”
p.197 – “Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left. Silence settled like thick velvet, wave after wave of it. A heavy, echoing silence. A few books flopped heavily out of the air, feeling silly.”
p.212 – “Fury rose like bile. She turned and set out after the noise, fighting the seductive forces that kept telling her how nice it would be just to relax her grip on her mind and sink into a warm sea of nothingness. Being angry, that was the thing. She knew it was most important to stay really angry.”
p.221 – " ‘Take it, then. But I don’t think you can. You can’t take anything unless it’s given to you, can you?’ "
p.230 – “Cutangle nodded. He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feelign that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him.”
p.234 – " ‘I’m cold,’ she conceded, ‘I just ain’t shivering.’ "
p.239 – " ‘So you were thrown away,’ snapped Granny. ‘So what? She’s hardly more than a child, and children throw us all away sooner or later. Is this loyal service? Have you no shame, lying around sulking when you could be of some use at last?’ "
p.244 – “He thought again how nice it would be to be the sort of wizard who lived in a little cave somewhere and collected herbs and thought significant thoughts and knew what the owls were saying. But probably the cave would be damp and the herbs would be poisonous and Treatle could never be sure, when all was said and done, exactly what thoughts were really significant.”
p.244 – “He had a cold certainty that while of course no one could possibly blame him for all this, everybody would.”
p.247 – " ‘I know. The building told me.’ "
p.247 – " ‘Yes, I was meaning to ask about that,’ said Cutangle, ‘because you see its’ never said anything to me and I’ve here for years.’ "
p.247 – " ‘Have you ever listened to it?’ "
p.251 – " ‘Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.’ "
p.252 – “…Do I want to be remembered as the first Archchancelllor to allow women into the University? Still… I’d be remembered that’s for sure.”
p.253 – " ‘The important thing about magic is how you don’t use it,’ said Esk, taking Simon’s arm.”
p.254 – " ‘They’re sort of– reflections of us,’ said Esk. ‘You can’t beat your reflections, they’ll always be as strong as you are. That’s why they draw nearer to you wehn you start using magic. And they don’t get tired. They feed off magic, so you can’t beat them with magic. No, the thing is… well, not using because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can, that really upsets them. They hate the idea. If people stopped using magic they’d die.’ "
p.254 – " ‘Because you’re saying that the real power is when you go right through magic and out the other side.’ "
p.259 – " ‘It’s pointed, too.’ Somehow being a wizard didn’t feel any different from not being a wizard."
p.261 – " ‘She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them waht they need,’ said Granny,… "