Wyrd Sisters

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Wyrd Sisters is a 1988 w;fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, the sixth Discworld novel.

Quotes

A key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way round.

• A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.

Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once.

• No gods anywhere play chess. They haven't got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; A key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

• The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

• It was dawning on him that the pleasures of the flesh were pretty sparse without the flesh. Suddenly life wasn't worth living. The fact that he wasn't living it didn't cheer him up at all.

• Granny Weatherwax didn't hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her. She didn't like its expression at all.

• The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn't worked.

• Demons were like genies or philosophy professors—if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.

• Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn't trust it. Often you couldn't even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence.

• This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.

• This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way round.

• Greebo's grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the other way round.

• "Actors," said Granny, witheringly. "As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more."

• The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

• "There must be a hundred silver dollars in here," moaned Boggis, waving a purse. "I mean, that's not my league. That's not my class. I can't handle that sort of money. You've got to be in the Guild of Lawyers or something to steal that much."

• "I'd like to know if I could compare you to a summer's day. Because—well, June 12th was quite nice, and...Oh. You've gone."

• "'Tis not right, a woman going into such places by herself."

Granny nodded. She thoroughly approved of such sentiments so long as there was, of course, no suggestion that they applied to her.

• The famous Battle of Morpork, he strongly suspected had consisted of about two thousand men lost in a swamp on a cold, wet day, hacking one another into oblivion with rusty swords. What would the last King of Ankh have said to a pack of ragged men who knew they were outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled? Something with bite, something with edge, something like a drink of brandy to a dying man; no logic, no explanation, just words that would reach right down through a tired man's brain and pull him to his feet by his testicles.

• It occurred to her that in addition to being a collection of other things, the forest was a thing in itself. Alive, only not alive in the way that, say, a shrew was alive.

And much slower. That would have to be important. How fast did a forest's heart beat? Once a year, maybe. Yes, that sounded about right. Out there the forest was waiting for the brighter sun and the longer days that would pump a million gallons of sap several hundred feet into the sky in one great systolic thump too big and loud to be heard. And it was at this point that Granny bit her lip. She'd just thought the word 'systolic', and it certainly wasn't in her vocabulary.