This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life.

‘PRAED: [shakes his head energetically] !!!’

‘And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time - there’s that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from fast asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.’

‘It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so fat claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.’

‘And instead of getting on with proper science scientists suddenly went around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and that there wasn’t really anything you could call reality to know anything about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did you know there were possibly all these little universes all over the place but no one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves? Incidentally, don’t you think this is a rather good t-shirt?’

‘Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she wasn’t on my level?” ‘”From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes coldly.’

‘Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.’

‘It [theatre] had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the riles. They altered the world because it sounded better.’

‘It was a landscape of describable beauty.’

‘Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.’

‘”He’ll be in Ankh-Morpork,” said Granny. “Mark my words. Everyone ends up there. We’ll start with Ankh-Morpork. You don’t have to search for people whan destiny is involved, you just wait for them in Ankh-Morpork.”’

‘”A witch doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘failure’, Gytha.” ‘They shot up into the clear air again. The horizon was a line of golden light as the slow dawn of the Disc sped across the land, bulldozing the suburbs of the night. ‘”Esme?” said Nanny Ogg, after a while. ‘”What?” ‘”It means ‘lack of success’.”’

‘They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.’

‘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.’

‘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.’

‘”If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, like the last refuge of an adult under siege.

‘It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted.’

‘”Sybil, I’m Commander of the Watch and he’s the ruler of the city. It’s not like going to complain to the teacher because I’m not doing well in geography...”’