Hermaphrodite Quotes & Sayings

Can a hermaphrodite be a cross-dresser? — Harlowe Pilgrim

Darwin's Ark
The fact is, I know those ancestors
floating through my sleep:
an animal that breathed water,
had a great swimming tail,
an imperfect skull, undoubtedly
hermaphrodite ... I slide
through all the oceans with these kin,
salt water pulsing in my veins,
and aeons follow me into the trees:
a hairy, tailed quadruped,
arboreal in its habits, scales
slipping off my flanks ...
I have sailed the ancients seas to come
to the bones of Megatherium ...
The thing I want to father most
is the rarest, most difficult thing of all.
Though knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood,
I want to be - a decent animal. — Philip Appleman

If she could have died ... if she could have disappeared forever ... but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite's body, continued in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live ... — J.K. Rowling

If you are a hermaphrodite, it is physically impossible to be gay. — Stephen Colbert

My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creatore, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands because such people did not often come my way, and I hoped that they might impart some great revelation to me, some insight which would help me to a clearer understanding of the world about me. — Robertson Davies

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface. — David Mamet

Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you. — Herculine Barbin

He didn't exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. "He was your enemy, and now he is dead," he said. "This is cause for rejoicing." "Not exactly," I said. I didn't know how to explain. "You're a Christian," he said, as if he'd discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian. "I'm a real bad one," I said hurriedly. His lips compressed, and I could see he was trying hard not to laugh. — Charlaine Harris

He dreams he is happy; that his corporeal nature has changed; or at least that he has flown off upon a purple cloud of another sphere peopled by beings of the same kind as himself. Alas! May his illusion last till dawn's awakening! He dreams the flowers dance round him in a ring like immense demented garlands, and impregnate him with their balmy perfumes while he sings a hymn of love, locked in the arms of a magically beautiful human being. But it is merely twilight mist he embraces, and when he wakes their arms will no longer be entwined. Awaken not, hermaphrodite. Do not wake yet, I beg you. Why will you not believe me? Sleep ... sleep forever. May your breast heave while pursuing the chimerical hope of happiness - that I allow you; but do not open your eyes. Ah! do not open your eyes. — Comte De Lautreamont

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back. — Pat Conroy

Moom' and 'tomb' actually rhyme, which is something Dickinson hardly ever did, preferring near-rhymes such as 'mat/gate', 'tune/sun,' and 'balm/hermaphrodite. — Connie Willis

As I realise that I am going to be intersex my whole life. Years and years and decades, maybe for seventy years, I'll be like this. And, unless I find someone who doesn't mind having sex with me, I'm going to be alone all that time. I'll probably be alone all that time. Think. How difficult it is for people to find someone they love, who likes the same things as them, who has the same values, who wants the same things out of life, and then imagine adding to that the fact that they not only have to be OK with having sex with a hermaphrodite, they have to like it.
Without being a totally weird pervert, I add to myself. — Abigail Tarttelin

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite. — A.S. Byatt

You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep. — Herculine Barbin

MOS: And besides, sir, You are not like a thresher that doth stand With a huge flail, watching a heap of corn, And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest grain, But feeds on mallows, and such bitter herbs; Nor like the merchant, who hath fill'd his vaults With Romagnia, and rich Candian wines, Yet drinks the lees of Lombard's vinegar: You will not lie in straw, whilst moths and worms Feed on your sumptuous hangings and soft beds; You know the use of riches, and dare give now From that bright heap, to me, your poor observer, Or to your dwarf, or your hermaphrodite, Your eunuch, or what other household-trifle Your pleasure allows maintenance. — Ben Jonson

You're a transsexual fighting with a hermaphrodite over a mistress. — Jerry Springer

Philosophy is an infertile hybrid. Life is a prolific hermaphrodite. — Raheel Farooq

Galen maintained that the human womb had two cavities, in which he was followed by the major Arabic medical writers. The idea that there were seven divisions, three warmer ones on the right engendering males, three colder ones on the left engendering females, and a seventh, in the middle, producing a hermaphrodite,
may have resulted from a systemization in Byzantine medicine of various separate ancient ideas bearing upon multiple births and sex differentiation; — Nancy G. Siraisi

As a rule of thumb, the hermaphrodite lifestyle works well if the prospects of finding a mate are slim, for example in low-density or immobile populations (explaining why many plants are hermaphrodites), while separate sexes develop in species with higher population densities or greater mobility. — Nick Lane

Why do you ask The Rock stupid questions? Why are you an ugly hermaphrodite? Nobody knows, Kevin Kelly. — Dwayne Johnson

Fear breeds upon itself because it is a hermaphrodite capable of endless reproduction. Fear is a contagious disease, spreading from its first victim to others in the vicinity until it is powerful enough to take charge of a group, in which event it becomes panic. Fear is the afterbirth of reason and calculation. It takes time to recuperate from fear. — Ernest K. Gann

No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school ground, anyway. — Ernest Cline

To confound the tyranny of man there should exist for a century a third sex, both male and female, and stronger than men. This new sex would prove with the lash that men as well as women are made for its pleasure; and then you would hear men protesting against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex and admitting that strength should not be the sole rule of right. Just why do they refuse to grant the women the independence which they would demand from the third sex? — Charles Fourier

Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me! — Herculine Barbin

We have given you a world as contradictory as a female, as cabbalistic as a male, a conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven, revolving in the ballroom of the skies glittering with conflict as diamonds: we have wasted paradox and mystery on you when all you ask us for is cause and effect! — Christopher Fry

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind. — Charles Darwin

I think that the benefit of playing someone like Queen Elizabeth is that so much has been written about her, and there's so much speculation about her - was she a hermaphrodite? She's so mythologised, and there are a lot of images of her. — Cate Blanchett

You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,' I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before - actually, physically. It must make you very unhappy. — Anais Nin

I bet that the best thing about being a hermaphrodite is that you always get to use the bathroom with the shortest line. — Brad Wilkerson

Choosing sides, the captain of the Red Team says, "We'll give you our best -pitcher. ... "
And we'll take the kid who picks his nose and eats it. And we'll take the kid who smells like piss. We'll take the leper and the left-handed Satanist and the HIV-infected hemophiliac and the hermaphrodite and the pedophile. We'll take drug addiction and we'll take JPEGs of the world instead of the world, MP3s instead of music, and we'll trade real life for sitting at a keyboard. We'll spot you happiness and we'll spot you humanity, and we'll sacrifice mercy just so long as you keep Cannibal at bay. — Chuck Palahniuk

The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power. — Wayne Koestenbaum

History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.
from Past Present and Future are One — Aberjhani