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Elephant
In “I, the Elephant, Wrote This,” the elephant’s twin sister grows up with more or less the same interests as the elephant. She doesn’t seem nearly as interested in learning why there aren’t any stories about African savanna elephants, but she’s just as intrigued by the thought of dying gloriously so one’s soul is visible in the stars. The sisters are extremely close all the way into adulthood, and they even give birth at the same time. The elephant’s sister, though, takes a more relaxed approach to parenthood by telling their babies stories in which elephants die. She reminds the elephant that withholding the stories will only encourage their children, so she tells the babies Castor and Pollux’s story in pieces. When the herd encounters hungry villagers, the villagers shoot the elephant’s sister. The elephant chooses to die with her sister rather than abandon her. The elephants die with their foreheads pressed together, in the same position as the elephants Castor and Pollux in their constellation.
Sister Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Sister or refer to Sister. 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
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
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“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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Sister Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Sister or refer to Sister. 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
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
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Explanation and Analysis:
“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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Page Number and Citation:
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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