Jeffery Russell Quotes

Dwarves are sequential hermaphroditic parthenogens," Ruby said, anticipating his question.

"What?"

"They can change back and forth from male to female and are capable of fertilizing themselves to make more dwarves. They exhibit what we regard as male characteristics, typically, but some favor a more feminine approach."

Durham sat with his mouth hanging open. Ruby poked him in the tongue with her quill feather making him gag and sputter.

"So, Ginny is, what, short for Regina? Virginia?"

"I rather think it's long to 'Gin'," Ruby answered. "She's head of hazard team and Thud's second."

"So, the changing sex thing. How does that work? Does it take a while or is it the sort of thing that might happen in the middle of a conversation?"

"Hard to say," Ruby said. "Does she need to clear her throat or did she just become a male? Is he just pausing for thought or did he just impregnate himself mid-sentence?" She shrugged. "Dwarf physiology isn't really my field."

"Is there an easy way to tell?"

"Which sex a dwarf is at the moment? Not that I'm aware of but I haven't managed to think of a situation where it would matter, either, so I've not dwelt on it much.

Chickens are true creatures of zen - they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheet unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason.

There is a distinct evolutionary advantage to being fuzzy, as much of the mammal kingdom had discovered, particularly when you wanted a human to scratch your back. The dwarven evolutionary tree had embraced this concept wholeheartedly only to discover that once you started talking and expressing opinions a human's desire to scratch your back became directly inverse to how fuzzy it was.

Mungo was a gnome. Disguised as a dwarf. The blatantly false beard was a giveaway. It appeared that Mungo had crafted it himself out of hair collected from a wide assortment of cars and then glued it to his face.

The air was thick and still, chilled. Water dripped somewhere, irregularly. Was the sun positioned perfectly to send ruddy rays of light through the swirling dust within, throwing their shadows long and stark across the floor? Of course it was.