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.
The accent of a man's native country remains in his mind and his heart, as it does in his speech.
Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
Each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground-the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster, but the discovery of an inner refuge.
Man's needs are infinite, and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.
Most men think graft a sporadic evil, breaking out here and there, with no connection between outbreaks. I shared the same opinion, but very soon I discovered that the graft in the cities always leads to the graft in the State.
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
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