Conundrum Quotes

“In a Kenya game park once I saw a family of wart-hogs waddling ungainly and in a tremendous hurry across the grass. Contemptuous though I am of those who find animals comic…still I could not help laughing at this quaint spectacle. My African companion rightly rebuked me. “You should not laugh at them,” he said. “They are beautiful to each other.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“Most people liked it best in the early spring, when the woods down to the river seemed to shift almost before one’s eyes from snowdrop white to daffodil yellow to the shimmer of bluebells—when the rooks cawed furiously in the beeches, the garden woke to life in a splurge of rhododendrons, and the young lambs caught their heads five times a day in the fencing down the drive. I shall always remember it with the profoundest gratitude, though, as it was that May, that last May, in the last of my old summers.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“After all, my life was one long protest against the separation of fact from fantasy: fantasy was fact, I reasoned, just as mind was body, or imagination truth.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“I did not know exactly where it was—in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my dreams. Nor did I know whether to be ashamed of it, proud of it, grateful for it, resentful of it. Sometimes I thought I would be happier without it, sometimes I felt it must be essential to my being. Perhaps one day, when I grew up, I would be as solid as other people appeared to be; but perhaps I was meant always to be a creature of wisp or spindrift, loitering in this inconsequential way almost as though I were intangible. I”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“the greatest pleasure I get from my Abyssinian cat Menelik is the feeling that I have, by the very magnetism of my affection, summoned him from some wild place, some forest or moorland, temporarily to sharpen his claws purring upon my knee.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“We hear now of the concept of “open marriage,” in which the partners are explicitly free to lead their own separate lives, choose their own friends if they wish, have their own lovers perhaps, restrained only by an agreement of superior affection and common concern. Ours was always such an arrangement. We were never dependent upon each other. For months at a time I would wander off across the world, and sometimes Elizabeth would travel in a different way, into preoccupations that were all her own. Though we were linked in such absences by a rapt concern with each other’s happiness, translated frequently, and at vast expense, into transatlantic telephone calls or weekend flights, still we never begrudged each other our separate lives, only finding our mutual affair more exciting when resumed.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“And so I ask myself, in mercy, or in common sense, if we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction?”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“If to modern Westerners the idea of changing sex has seemed, at least until recently, monstrous, absurd, or ungodly, among simpler peoples it has more often been regarded as a process of divine omniscience, a mark of specialness. To stand astride the sexes was not a disgrace but a privilege, and it went often with supernatural powers and priestly functions.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“Other cultures too, ancient and contemporary, have freely recognized a no man’s land between male and female, and have allowed people to inhabit it without ignominy.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“Myth and history alike, I discovered, were full, if not of precedents, at least of parallels—men who lived as women, women who lived as men, hermaphrodites, transvestites, narcissists, not to speak of homosexuals or bisexuals. There is no norm of sexual constitution, and almost nobody has ever conformed absolutely to the conventional criteria of male and female”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“It is a fine thing to be independent in life, and a proud sensation to know yourself unique; but a person who stands all on his own, utterly detached from his fellows, may come to feel that reality itself is an illusion”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“...nobody really knows how anybody else feels - you may think you are feeling as a woman, or as a man, but you may simply be feeling as yourself.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“I spent half my life traveling in foreign places. I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately come to see that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey. I have never doubted, though, that much of the emotional force, what the Welsh call hwyl, that men spend in sex, I sublimated in travel--perhaps even in movement itself, for I have always loved speed, wind, and great spaces [. . .] But it could not work forever [. . .] My manhood was meaningless.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl (AS: I don't share that part of her feelings fully). I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum