Quotes from Equal Rites

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“Cutangle: While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.

Treatle: I hadn't looked at it like that, but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance.

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“That's one form of magic, of course."
"What, just knowing things?"
"Knowing things that other people don't know.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. 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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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 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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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 half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“I'm not a lady, I'm a witch.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“There would be a price... But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spent 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 everyday.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity. ”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. 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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune?"
"Can't girls seek their fortune?"
"I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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 shadow 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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Equal Rites

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