Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour.

And what had he wanted? He'd never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted yesterday to be different from today.

Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?

You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say.