My favorite Discworld Quotes

For a lot of the books it has been over a decade since I last read them and I found myself bookmarking a lot of quotes that stood out to me.

It seemed fun to save them somewhere which is why I started this tumblr 🐘🐢🦧

Reading list (the crossed out ones I already finished)

1. The Colour of Magic

2. The Light Fantastic

3. Equal Rites

4. Mort (currently reading)

5. Sourcery

6. Wyrd Sisters

7. Pyramids

8. Guards! Guards! (After seeing it as a play like 8 times it might be a while before I can reread this one)

9. Faust Eric (currently reading)

10. Moving Pictures

11. Reaper Man

12. Witches Abroad

13. Small Gods

14. Lords and Ladies

15. Men at Arms

16. Soul Music

17. Interesting times

18. Maskerade

19. Feet of Clay

20. Hogfather

21. Jingo

22. The Last Continent

23. Carpe Jugulum

24. The Fifth Elephant

25. The Truth

26. Thief of Time

27. The Last Hero

28. The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents

29. Night Watch

30. The Wee Free Men

39. Snuff

31. Monstrous Regiment

32. A Hat Full of Sky

33. Going Postal

34. Thud!

35. Wintersmith

36. Making Money

37. Unseen Academicals

38. I Shall Wear Midnight

40. Raising Steam

She carefully lifted the lid of the first hive.

“Your bees,” she went on, “is your mead, your wax, your bee gum, your honey. A wonderful thing is your bee. Ruled by a queen, too,” she added, with a touch of approval.

It seemed to consist mainly of things to remember.

The lessons were quite practical. There was cleaning the kitchen table and Basic Herbalism. There was mucking out the goats and The Uses of Fungi. There was doing the washing and The Summoning of the Small Gods. And there was always tending the big copper still in the scullery and The Theory and Practice of Distillation. By the time the warm Rim winds were blowing, and the snow remained only as little streaks of slush on the Hub side of trees, Esk knew how to prepare a range of ointments, several medicinal brandies, a score of special infusions, and a number of mysterious potions that Granny said she might learn the use of in good time.

What she hadn't done was any magic at all.

“All in good time,” repeated Granny vaguely.

“But I'm supposed to be a witch!”

“You're not a witch yet. Name me three herbs good for the bowels.”

Esk put her hands behind her back, closed her eyes, and said: “The flowering tops of Greater Peahane, the root pith of Old Man's Trousers, the stems of the Bloodwater Lily, the seedcases of -”

“Good. You're learning.”

“But it's not magic!”

Granny sat down at the kitchen table.

“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 animals. And the ways of people, too.”

“That's all it is!” said Esk, horrified.

“All? It's a pretty big all,” said Granny,

Smith nodded. He felt he was on firmer ground here, but he wasn't certain of where it was going to lead.

“And then there's the ticker. Applejack,” said the witch. The smith nodded. Everyone in Bad Ass made applejack in the winter, by leaving cider tubs outside overnight and taking out the ice until a tiny core of alcohol was left.

“Well, you can drink lots of cider and you just feel better and that's it, isn't it?”

The smith nodded again.

“But applejack, you drink that in little mugs and you don't drink a lot and you don't drink it often, because it goes right to your head?”

The smith nodded again and, aware that he wasn't making a major contribution to the dialogue, added, “That's right.”

“That's the difference,” said Granny.

“The difference from what?”

Granny sighed. “The difference between witch magic and wizard magic,” she said. “And it's found her, 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?”

Granny hesitated. The tree might as well have asked why fish couldn't be birds. She drew a deep breath, and started to speak. And stopped. She knew 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.

She blew out the candle and lay back, with the owl perched on her finger.

Granny's body stilled. The owl felt her enter its mind, and graciously made room. Granny knew she would regret this, Borrowing twice in one day would leave her good for nothing in the morning, and with a terrible desire to eat mice. 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.

“Oh yes?” she said, her voice dead-level. “You know of a better way, do you?”

“You could magic it alight.”

Granny paid great attention to arranging bits of twig on the reluctant flames.

“How would I do that, pray?” she said, apparently addressing her remarks to the fireback.

“Er,” said Esk, “I . . . I can't remember. But you must know anyway, don't you? Everyone knows you can do magic.”

“There's magic,” said Granny, “and then again, there's magic. 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. If the Creator had meant us to use magic for lighting fires, then he wouldn't have given us - er, matches.”

“But could you light a fire with magic?” said Esk, as Granny slung an ancient black kettle on its hook. “I mean, if you wanted to. If it was allowed.”

“Maybe,” said Granny, who couldn't: fire had no mind, it wasn't alive, and they were two of the three reasons.

“You could light it much better.”

The hump didn't uncurl.

Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them - when she thought about them at all - as coming somewhere between animals and people. 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 enquired 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.

Granny, in fact, was at a loss, but she knew she had to do something.

“Didda nasty wolfie fwiten us, den?” she hazarded.

For quite the wrong reasons, this seemed to work. From the depths of the ball a muffled voice said: “I am eight, you know.”

“People who are eight don't curl up in the middle of the snow,” said Granny, feeling her way through the intricacies of adult-child conversation.

The ball didn't answer.

“I've probably got some milk and biscuits at home,” Granny ventured.

There was no perceptible effect.

“Eskarina Smith, if you don't behave this minute I will give you such a smack!”

Esk poked her head out cautiously.

“There's no need to be like that,” she said.

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

They looked around cautiously. A scruffy crow was indeed watching them from a distant tree stump.

“They say there's a whole family over Crack Peak way that can turn themselves into wolves,” said Gulta, who wasn't one to leave a promising subject, "because one night someone shot a wolf and next day their auntie was limping with an arrow wound in her leg, and ....

“I don't think people can turn themselves into animals,” said Esk, slowly.

“Oh yes, Miss Clever?”

“Granny is quite big. If she turned herself into a fox what would happen to all the bits that wouldn't fit?”

“She'd just magic them away,” said Cern.

“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.

They gave her a look.

“I can't see Granny on a seesaw,” said Gulta. Cern giggled.

“No, I mean every time something happens, something else has to happen too - I think,” said Esk uncertainly, picking her way around a deeper than usual snowdrift. “Only in the . . . opposite direction.”

“That's silly,” said Gulta, “because, look, you remember when that fair came last summer and there was a wizard with it and he made all those birds and things appear out of nothing? I mean it just happened, he just said these words and waved his hands, and it just happened. There weren't any seesaws.”

“And you didn't hit anything, Gul.”

“There was a swing,” said Cern.

Their conversation wandered away like a couple of puppies. Esk listened with half an ear. I know what I mean, she told herself. Magic's easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There's nothing magical about it. All the funny words and waving the hands is just . . . it's only for....

“We're going to see old Weatherwax.”

“But you don't have to come.”

“Because you'll just slow us down and probably cry anyway.”

Esk looked down at them solemnly. She didn't cry a lot, it never seemed to achieve much.

“If you don't want me to come then I'll come,” she said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.

“Oh, we want you to come,” said Gulta quickly.