You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fiction and nonfiction blur together, revealing deeper truths beyond mere facts.
Yann Martel's quote emphasizes that the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are not rigid. While fiction is not based on real events, it conveys emotional and psychological truths that resonate with readers, often providing insights that factual accounts may overlook. Through narrative and storytelling, fiction engages our emotions and helps us understand complex realities in ways that pure factual representation may fail to do.
Themes
FictionNonfictionTruthEmotionalPsychological
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about literature, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of storytelling.
More from Yann Martel
All quotes βCome 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
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, thatβs 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
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As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.
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You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.
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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
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It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
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Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
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