You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complex emotions of missing someone, blending love with pain.
In this quote, Yann Martel expresses the paradox of missing someone who is no longer present in one's life, illustrating how love can persist even amid loss. The mention of dreams, particularly nightmares touched by love, highlights the emotional turmoil and longing that accompany the process of grieving, capturing the strangeness and depth of human emotions.
In practice
In a speech about love and loss, you could use this quote to illustrate the complexities of human emotions.
You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!
Just try to love, and manifest it. When your heart is open, there is this energy of love that flows in, fulfills everything and somehow transmutes itself into actions.
Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much.
I believe in the religion of Love, whatever direction its caravans may take, for Love is my religion and my faith.
Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.
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