You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote illustrates that art forms like music, painting, and storytelling help make sense of our experiences and emotions.
Yann Martel's quote emphasizes the idea that just as music translates noise into a structured and meaningful experience, and painting transforms color into a coherent visual narrative, storytelling encapsulates life into understandable interpretations. Each art form serves as a medium through which we can process and find clarity in our experiences, highlighting the profound connections between creativity and the human condition.
Themes
ArtStorytellingMusicMeaningLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the power of creativity, a speaker might quote this to highlight how art helps us understand our lives.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you're being cynical or schematic.
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