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Quote by Kortney Keisel

“Marx raised an eyebrow at his secretary. “Elsbeth, I have a feeling the only reason you wake me up early is so that you can see me without my shirt on.” She rolled her eyes. “Young man, don’t flatter yourself. I may be old, but I can still remember changing your diapers.”

Quote by Kortney Keisel

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The Forgotten Queen

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Kortney Keisel

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“Every race has its own qualities and affinities! Why, take us dwarves, for example. We are the finest smiths in all the realms! Except the elves. Their work is finer. But of course, no one can match us dwarves for strength! Except the elves: they are far stronger than we. And then there are wizards, who are the wisest of all peoples. Wisest of all, that is, save the elves. Ah, and then we have men! The most fearless and ingenious and creative of all speaking species! Second only to elves, who are more fearless, and more ingenious, and more creative. But then we have goblins like yourself, Plumleaf, who have sharp eyes and silent feet, and can see in darkness better than all other races. All other races but elves, who can see far better in the dark than any other-”

“Obvious solutions to serious problems often go thousands of years before being stumbled upon. Hand protection on swords, for example, took a remarkably long time to develop; and sanitation in surgery took even longer, and that was with the best and brightest medical practitioners of several eras all cogitating over their tremendous death rates.”

“I played a few games myself, back in the days before consoles were ousted by the PC Master Race, and I’ve thought more than once about how these virtual worlds are made of numbers. Ones and zeroes, unless I’m mistaken. But think about this for a moment: what about the unseen particles that make up the human body? The atoms that make up everything we see and feel? Is it not true that the closer we look, the less we see? It’s not the collection of atoms that matter, but the man, yet the atoms are the matter that make the man. Can the same logic not be applied to the world we’re in now? Shanawan is made of numbers, but it’s not the numbers that matter: it’s Shanawan. If my cells malfunction I get sick and die. If the numbers falter we get glitches and lag. When we look at a landscape we see a landscape, not atoms. When we look at Shanawan we see Shanawan, not numbers. The two aren’t on the same level, yet they aren’t entirely dissimilar. The game is both fantasy and reality. Not too different from man.”

“What am I? Average. A middleweight. Not the brightest bloke in the world, but certainly not the dimmest. I have read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and understood them, I think (they were about girls, right?), but I don't like them very much; my all-time top five favourite books are The Big Sleep my Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and, I don't know, something by William Gibson, or Kurt Vonnegut. I read the Guardian and the Observer as well as the NME and music glossies; I am not averse to going down to Camden to watch subtitled films (top five subtitled films: Betty Blue, Subway, Tie Me Down!, The Vanishing, Diva), although on the whole I prefer American films, and therefore the best films ever made: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Reservoir Dogs.) I'm ok looking... a girlfriend once told me I looked a bit like Peter Gabriel, and he's not too bad, is he? I'm average height, not slim, not fat, no unsightly facial hair, I keep myself clean, wear jeans and T-shirts and a leather jacket more or less all the time apart from in the summer when I leave the leather jacket at home. I vote Labour. I have a pile of classic comedy videos... I can see what feminists are on about, most of the time, but not the radical ones. My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one company frame. I'd say that there were millions like me, but there aren't, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humour but look like Woody Allen. Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don't do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have.”

“(at the police station pantry) There’s a large tub of instant coffee on top of a humming fridge, plus a microwave that doesn’t look as if it’s been cleaned since the millennium bug was a thing. A page of A4 has been taped to the fridge with, STOP STEALING MY MILK, YA THIEVING SHITES written in large capital letters. Zoe asks if I want a tea, then sets a kettle boiling as we sit around a small table. Zoe nods along as the kettle clicks off. She raids the cupboard for a pair of teabags from a giant PG Tips box, then drops one in each of two mugs, before filling. Milk comes from the fridge, although it’s unclear if this is of the ‘thieving shites’ variety, and then Zoe sits across from me.”