A Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Quote Topics

Always Around Been Being Both Cal Did Did You Know Everybody Except Female Forever Got Half Halves Hermaphrodites Human Human Being Know Male Original Other Other Half Person Plato Plato S Said Searching Separated Then Two Us Why

Quote Author

Jeffrey Eugenides
American - Novelist
Born: April 13, 1960

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Milan Kundera

In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

Haruki Murakami

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

Plato

Linda and I aren't one and one. We are two halves that make a whole -- two halves fitted together are more efficient than either half would ever be alone!

Bruce Lee

And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.

Ray Bradbury

A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate...humble obedience...but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested.

Elisabeth Elliot

Someone once said that two halves make a whole. And when two halves move in together, it makes a whole lot of stuff.

Sarah Jessica Parker

Imaan is of two halves; half is patience (Sabr) and half is being thankful (Shukr).

Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

Yes. The original argument is defective. Substitute the word 'male' for 'gay,' and you'll see the flaw: 'Male people cannot be normal. If everyone were male starting tomorrow, the human race would die out, so being male cannot be nature's intended way.' Or you could substitute the word 'female.' In either case, the argument makes no sense: Being male or female is perfectly normal.

Marilyn vos Savant

Then do you mean that I have got to go on catching these damned two-and-a-half pounders at this corner forever and ever? The keeper nodded. Hell! said Mr. Castwell. Yes , said his keeper.

G. E. M. Skues

there are only two basic ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity. All societies are patterned on either a dominator model - in which human hierarchies are ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force - or a partnership model, with variations in between.

Riane Eisler

The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original; the only original author being God.

Herman Melville

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

James Baldwin

In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being; he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a child of darkness who is equal and complementary to the more obvious child of light.

Laurens van der Post

It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half.