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.
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 don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
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I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.
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I have not lost any of my crazy, fearless, raw, soulful, eclectic side and I plan on continuing to tell universal stories in an unforgettable way.
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I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
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Photographers are always imposing
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As if some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--Only this and nothing more.
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