" At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine — and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When "

― Yann Martel , Self