You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it's a sad view.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the melancholic acceptance of a bleak fate and the companionship that can be found in shared despair.
Yann Martel's quote invites individuals to acknowledge their descent into 'oblivion', suggesting a journey towards an inevitable end that is both lonely and sorrowful. The mention of sitting together and offering a window seat implies a need for connection and comfort even in the face of despair, highlighting the bittersweet nature of human experience and the solace found in shared understanding of our darker moments.
Themes
OblivionSadnessCompanionshipDespairJourney
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about existentialism, you might quote Martel to underscore the acceptance of life's darker truths.
More from Yann Martel
All quotes →Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
Yann MartelRead
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
Yann MartelRead
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Yann MartelRead
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
Yann MartelRead
If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
Yann MartelRead
Similar quotes
I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes and solids.
Baruch SpinozaRead
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas SowellRead
He does not regard the quantity of faith, but the quality. He does not measure its degree, but its truth. He will not break any bruised reed, nor quench any smoking flax. He will never let it be said that any perished at the foot of the cross.
J. C. RyleRead
The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values: The logic of domination and subordination that is central to patriarchy, hyper-patriotic nationalism, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism.
Robert JensenRead
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. MenckenRead
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Douglas AdamsRead