You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in his mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? -- Love. That was his answer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the concepts of divinity, sacrifice, and the nature of love amidst suffering.
Yann Martel's quote delves into the paradox of a divine figure enduring the burden of death and suffering. Through the lens of love, it questions the necessity of intertwining beauty with pain and suggests that God's decision to embrace mortality is tied deeply to the essence of love, which inherently involves sacrifice and acceptance of imperfection in a perfect creation.
Themes
GodLoveSufferingSacrificeDeathBeauty
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of sacrifice in relationships.
More from Yann Martel
All quotes →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.
Yann MartelRead
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
Similar quotes
It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.
Glenn CloseRead
Just as our brains fill in the details of an image our eyes record only roughly, so, too, do our brains employ tricks we are unaware of to fill in details about people we don't know intimately.
Leonard MlodinowRead
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Steven PinkerRead
There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.
HomerRead
It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.
Anne RiceRead
Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
Denis DiderotRead