You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.
Interpretation
Fame is an external perception rather than an internal feeling.
This quote by Yann Martel reflects on the nature of fame, suggesting that it is not an intrinsic experience like love or hunger, but rather a construct based on how others view and react to an individual. Fame tends to be a projection from the outside world, similar to how identity characteristics such as sexual orientation, ethnicity, or minority status can be perceived, emphasizing that one's self is distinct from public perception.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of celebrity culture.
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.
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
Men of patriarchal cultures have been committing heinous acts in the name of their God ever since they created a god for themselves. It seems that the earlier, goddess-oriented, nature-centered religions were far less cruel.
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand! Oh, oh, oh!
In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
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