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Suleiman
Castor and Pollux were two zoo elephants; the elephant in “I, the Elephant, Wrote this” grows up hearing their story often. They lived at the Paris Zoo until the Franco-Prussian War, when rich Parisians butchered and ate them. The elephant and her sister grow up hearing their story and eventually pass the story onto their own children. The elephant explains that elephants see Castor and Pollux in the stars where humans see their human counterparts in the constellation Gemini.
Castor and Pollux Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Castor and Pollux or refer to Castor and Pollux. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
I, the Elephant, Wrote This: Soul of Elephant
Quotes
“A zoo,” she said to them, “is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.”
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As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
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Castor and Pollux Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Castor and Pollux or refer to Castor and Pollux. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
I, the Elephant, Wrote This: Soul of Elephant
Quotes
“A zoo,” she said to them, “is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.”
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Explanation and Analysis:
As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
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