You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea of revitalizing what is considered lifeless or obsolete through creativity and artistic expression.
Yann Martel compares his creative process to that of a taxidermist, suggesting that he aims to breathe new life into a seemingly dead event. This metaphor highlights the artist's role in transforming forgotten or overlooked concepts into something fresh and engaging, emphasizing the continual opportunity for renewal in art and life.
Themes
ArtCreativityRevivalTransformationRenewal
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation on artistic inspiration, I might say, 'As Yann Martel illustrates, we can breathe new life into the past, just like a taxidermist.'
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
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Blaise PascalRead
You're never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it's rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle.
Annie LennoxRead
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
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My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
Patti SmithRead
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.
Marcel ProustRead
Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that's stripped down.
Dave GrohlRead