In front of her [Nanny Ogg] the cat Greebo, glad to be home again, lay on his back with all four paws in the air, doing his celebrated something-found-in-the-gutter impersonation.

'I learned my craft from Nanny Gripes,' said Granny Weatherwax, 'who learned it from Goody Heggety, who got it from Nanna Plumb, who was taught it by Black Aliss, who --'

'So what you're saying is,' said Diamanda, loading the words into the sentence like cartridges in a chamber, 'that no one has actually learned anything new?'

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.

Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before. The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded. Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails, and testicles of their father. ** There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people.

People think that they live life as a moving dot traveling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches. Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.