A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.

Verence wasn't frightened, however; not simply because it is difficult to be in fear of anything when the bits you need to be frightened with are curdling several yards away, but because he had never really been frightened of anything in his life, and wasn't going to start now.  This was partly because he didn't have the imagination, but he was also one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time.

Most people aren't.  They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is - anticipating the future, or holding onto the past.  They're usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it.  Most people are like this.  They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next.  It's already happening to them.

Only in our dreams are we free.  The rest of the time we need wages.

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.  You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you.  Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.

Granny subsided into unaccustomed, troubled silence, and tried to listen to the prologue.  The theater worried her.  It had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn't in her control.  It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were.  And it was worse than that.  It was magic that didn't belong to magical people.  It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn't know the rules.  They altered the world because it sounded better.

Granny Weatherwax was often angry.  She considered it one of her strong points.  Genuine anger was one of the world's great creative forces.  But you had to learn how to control it.  That didn't mean you let it trickle away.  It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods.  Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape.  And yet... and yet.

Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth.  Death was intrigued.  They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreampt up took them further in.  He was fascinated.