You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the harsh realities that become apparent when faced with the light of day, contrasting hope with despair.
In this quote, Yann Martel conveys the idea that the arrival of dawn, typically associated with new beginnings and hope, also brings clarity to the darker truths that one might have only felt in the dark. The imagery of rain and waves suggests overwhelming challenges that seem more daunting in the light, highlighting the paradox of gaining awareness while simultaneously confronting intensified struggles.
Themes
DawnDarknessRealityStruggleHopeDespair
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
More from Yann Martel
All quotes →Come 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, that’s 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
I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.
Henry MillerRead
I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world. I believe that they are all God- given and I believe that they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoints of the followers of these faiths, we should find that they were at bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.
Mahatma GandhiRead
Just to the extent that the Bible was appealed to in matters of science, science was retarded; and just to the extent that science has been appealed to in matters of religion, religion has advanced - so that now the object of intelligent religionists is to adopt a creed that will bear the test and criticism of science.
Robert Green IngersollRead
The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
Thomas PaineRead
The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John IrvingRead