You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our encounters with others can have a deep and lasting impact on our identities.
This quote by Yann Martel highlights the profound influence that our interactions with other people can have on our lives. The relationships we form and the experiences we share can lead to significant personal transformations that shape who we are, sometimes even altering how we perceive ourselves and the way we identify with our own names.
Themes
ChangeRelationshipsIdentityTransformationInfluence
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on the importance of connections, this quote can emphasize how friendships shape 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.
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
Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
Jeanette WintersonRead
The sisters and brothers that you meet give you the materials which your character uses to build itself. It is said that some people are born great, others achieve it, some have it thrust upon them. In truth, the ways in which your character is built have to do with all three of those. Those around you, those you choose, and those who choose you.
Maya AngelouRead
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
Edith WhartonRead
He certainly is very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider person.
Jane AustenRead
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.
C. S. LewisRead
A chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and time's busy fingers are not practiced in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may; will it be in the same way? With the same sympathies? With the same sentiments? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream? Rarely, rarely!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1St Baron LyttonRead