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
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I can hold a cup of sake on a full moon in Japan, and the reflection of the moon in that little cup can make me feel so enthusiastic about beauty. That one good, magical moment can give me enough to create other things like the teardrop earring or necklace.
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She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
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Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?
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When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.
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Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience's hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy.
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