Contact
Privacy
Book: Self
Quotes of Book: Self
TOP TAGS :sam-gamgeesex-appealbarriersvainuntouchabledealingbig-governmentachieving-excellence

  1. Yann Martel _ Self

    It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.
    book-quote

  2. Yann Martel _ Self

    Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change. I
    book-quote

  3. Yann Martel _ Self

    If a friend of mine in Paris had confessed that he was in love with a Simon or a Peter, I would have compared notes with him on my love for Mary Ann. Gender in matters of love struck me as of no greater consequence than flavours in ice-cream. I imagine the absence of religion in my upbringing was one factor that had allowed this belief to survive. Perhaps, too, I had a natural openness in the matter. At any rate, it was completely unwittingly that I had disregarded this fundamental polarity of North American society.
    book-quote

  4. Yann Martel _ Self

    I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine.
    book-quote

  5. Yann Martel _ Self

    At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine - and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When
    book-quote

  6. Yann Martel _ Self

    Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It
    book-quote

  7. Yann Martel _ Self

    Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats. I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations.
    book-quote

  8. Yann Martel _ Self

    Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.
    book-quotetreesnatureorgasm

  9. Yann Martel _ Self

    You see, the penis, it's so graceless, wouldn't you agree? When it's cold and shrivelled up, it looks like W.H. Auden in his old age; when it's hot, it flops and dangles about in a ridiculous way; when it's excited, it looks so pained and earnest you'd think it was going to burst into tears. And the scrotum! To think that something so vital to the survival of the species, fully responsible for 50 per cent of the ingredients--though none of the work--should hang freely from the body in a tiny, defenceless bag of skin. One whack, one bite, one paw-scratch--and it's just the right level, too, for your average animal, a dog, a lion, a sabre-tooth tiger--and that's it, end of story. Don't you think it should get better protection? Behind some bone, for example, like us? What could be better than our nicely tapered entrance? It's discreet and stylish, everything is cleverly and compactly encased in the body, with nothing hanging out within easy reach of a closing subway door, there's a neat triangle of hair above it, like a road sign, should you lose your way--it's perfect. The penis is just such a lousy design. It's pre-Scandinavian. Pre-Bauhaus, even.
    book-quotesexgendersexual-organs

  10. Yann Martel _ Self

    Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don't like.
    book-quote

  11. Yann Martel _ Self

    A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.
    book-quoteonenessgrounded

  12. Yann Martel _ Self

    When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.
    book-quoteexperience
Categories