Hermaphrodite Quotes

“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, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite

“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, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite

“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, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite

“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“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.”
― Jeffery Russell, The Dungeoneers