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 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
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, 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
Similar quotes
When I went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that's the kind of music I'm interested in making.
MatisyahuRead
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen KingRead
Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.
John LahrRead
But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
T.C. BoyleRead
Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
Lawrence VenutiRead
Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowRead