Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Yann Martel, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Yann Martel quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 387 Yann Martel quotes for you to read and share.

Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000013278
I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000020059
Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000022697
Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000025041
Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000030440
Stories
individual stories, family stories, national stories
are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000032011
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000048329
I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000048955
I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000050641
Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000051976
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000064504
I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000068048
To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000072079
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. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000087815
Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000095694
Everything in me, right down to the pores of my skin, was expressing joy. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000097159
I'm just trying to help"
"Do your uncle's bonsai eat meat?"
"I don't think so"
"Have you ever been bitten by one of his bonsai?"
"No."
"In that case, your uncle's bonsai are not helping us -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000106575
My greatest wish
other than salvation
was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000113190
At last I managed to haul it aboard. It was over three feet long. The bucket was useless. It would fit the dorado like a hat. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000115623
Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000118499
I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I have to turn miracle into routine. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000122543
It's a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000126974
We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. When he was gone, the sea had only itself to contemplate. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000127410
It's not atheists who get stuck in my caw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we ... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as means of transportation. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000130722
Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000135277
Animals are also poisoned. And there are indecencies -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000141189
If you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000141982
That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000150645
My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000152645
The sound would disappear, but the hurt would linger, like the smell of piss long after it has evaporated. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000158072
I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000177690
Now comes the difficult part: you must provoke the animal that is afflicting you. Tiger, rhinoceros, ostrich, wild boar, brown bear- no matter the beast, you must get its goat. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000178823
Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans. Yann Martel in Life of Pi, Page 25 -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000179352
'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000182486
People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000184061
Animals fight, it is with the intent to kill and with the understanding that they may be killed. A -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000184065
We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000184673
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000193324
Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000195555
There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000197001
It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000198085
India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000201426
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000206499
It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000216731
I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000228008
Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness
how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000229246
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000231733
The presence of God is the finest of rewards. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000232316
What is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities - the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net of there's so little fish to catch? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000235662
If you don't have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000253855
In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000255275
The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000260256
A zoo is a cultural institution. Like a public library, like a museum, it is at the service of popular education and science. And by that token, not much of a money-making venture for the Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000271191
Proves to be a devastating hunter. Hyenas attack -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000285711
A problem of the soul, a heaviness of the heart, a darkness of the conscience -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000287068
I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000289360
Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000289401
If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000293419
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000296317
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000297148
It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life. This happened time and again. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000297202
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 Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000301301
Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times - that is, hard - had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000305815
If there is a change, it is usually for the lesser rather than the greater; many people seem to lose God along life's way. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000306170
Loneliness comes up to him like a sniffing dog. It circles him insistently. He waves it away, but it refuses to leave him alone. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000307352
Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000309783
Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000315810
When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000334644
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000338230
Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000347135
We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more-there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000351943
I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000353477
A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000356645
Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000358367
I quite deliberately dressed wild animals in tame costumes of my imagination. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000359574
But immobilizing darts don't bring on sleep gently, like a good cup of tea; they knock out like a bottle of hard liquor straight up. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000363563
Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them ... it is a fact commonly known in the trade. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000368431
My life is like a memento more painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000370189
I am careful never to talk about religion. Who am I to kick at people's crutches? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000371742
I must go the washroom. I've shaken a lot of hands. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000371752
This tiny habitation on wheels, with bit parts of the living room, the washroom, and the fireplace, is a pathetic admission that human life is no more than this: an attempt to feel at home while racing towards oblivion. He -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000372691
He found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000375325
The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000375902
These people walk by a window deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual" But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000391470
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000394345
I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000402328
He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000404484
What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000407072
Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000407522
My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000411151
To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000412528
I'm more preoccupied with furnishing my head than the place where I live. The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000413991
My heart began to beat
like a merry drum and blood started flowing through my veins like cars from a wedding party
honking their way through town. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000418109
To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000419261
Religion?" Mr Kumar grinned broadly. "I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000428136
I gave up trying to find out. Any knowledge I might gain was useless. I had no means of controlling where I was going - no rudder, no sails, no motor, some oars, but insufficient brawn. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000432238
Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000434103
I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. But what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000449280
In a movie, you need good actors, whereas in a book, you don't, unless you have a really bad imagination. In a book, your imagination will do the acting for you. Also, the process of revelation is often different. Tension is achieved in a different way. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000452516
Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000458002
Some of us give up[ ... ] with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000468006
Tiptoe to the water's edge. They show their raiments. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000469109
I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000483648
Those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly we are not the same afterwards. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000488922
Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilerated speechlessness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000490512
The precept that location is key to the success of a business applies to art, and even to life itself: we thrive or wither depending on how nourishing our environment is. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000504570
But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000506826
This story has a happy ending. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000512153
I love Canada ... It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000512202
Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? ... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000522030
He was a man whose profession it was to love, and he would offer comfort and guidance to the best of his ability. I -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000526714
The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000532727
If you become sick yourself, don't waste your vomit by sending it overboard. Vomit makes an excellent border guard. Puke on the edges of your territory. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000534880
When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000545243
Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000549057
Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000558838
I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000588143
Most people take who they are, naturally, as a given, and they're interested in the sexual other, but not in being the sexual other. Most men are interested in women - whether sexually or not is not the question - but they don't necessarily want to be a woman. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000588584
If it weren't for this hyena, the sailors wouldn't have thrown me into the lifeboat and I would have stayed on the ship and I surely would have drowned; and if I had to share quarters with a wild animal, better the upfront ferocity of a dog than the power and stealth of a cat. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000589537
Despite attending a nominally Christian school, I had not yet been inside a church - and I wasn't about to dare the deed now. I knew very little about the religion. It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000592778
The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000593723
Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000596318
I sang that tree's glory, its solid, unhurried purity, its slow beauty. Oh, that I could be like it, rooted to the ground but with my every hand raised up to God in praise! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000600619
If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000607658
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000610341
It was a placid explosion of orange and red, a great chromatic symphony, a
colour canvas of supernatural proportions, truly a splendid Pacific sunset, quite wasted on me. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000610400
Of the river of time, he worries neither about its spring nor its delta. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000614251
Right away, death is word-eating. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000614310
My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000626284
[T]o be a castaway is to be caught up in grim and exhausting opposites. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000626674
the senile, lecherous expression of a camel. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000628670
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 Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000645540
From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to fictitious address. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000650268
The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord's hand holding me up. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000651095
Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000666954
I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000668904
Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000670545
Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000673187
One discovers weeping - one's weeping personality - only upon weeping. It is a strange discovery, not only to others but to oneself -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000692173
The holy word is story, and story is the holy word. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000692283
Isn't it ironic, Richard Parker? We're in hell yet still we're afraid of immortality -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000701771
And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000711032
We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000718574
I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000719746
I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000735942
With questions that are orders -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000736154
Ageing is not easy, Senhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000736295
Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? The -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000740562
If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000743800
Without a driver this bus is lost. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000743917
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000744360
I knelt a mortal; I rose an immortal. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000748909
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000764777
As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000767157
As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000773468
A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000791677
Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000801390
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000801663
It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000805413
Yes! Practice-singular!' the wise men screamed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point (Life of Pi 68). -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000806009
Bapu Gandhi said, 'All religions are true.' I just want to love God. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000806885
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000809015
Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000811803
I thought I knew not only her habits but also her limits. This display of ferocity, of savage courage, made me realize that I was wrong. All my life I had known only a part of her. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000812755
The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000820058
For example
I wonder
could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I'll tell you, that's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way that number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000837509
Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000843242
We think we live in a global village. We don't. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000868325
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 Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000870933
There people fail to realise that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. - Pi Patel in Life of Pi
-- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000873577
I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000878266
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000880205
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000880973
Gloom is but a shadow of a cloud passing by -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000894847
I became aware of a voice inside my head. [ ... ] It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000903747
My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quiet and introspective - did something to soothe my shattered self. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000922822
There's no boot."
No boot?"
No."
That makes me sad."
I ate it."
You ate the boot?"
Yes."
Was it good?"
No. Were the cigarettes good?"
No. I couldn't finish them."
I couldn't finish the boot. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000924119
Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgment that comes down heavily. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000924841
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000925100
If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000930029
In my experience, a castaway's worst mistake is to hope too much and to do too little. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000948340
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000951544
A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction
besides unexpected interludes
has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000952025
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000968222
What of God's silence? I think it over. I add:
An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000971806
I kept one eye on the horizon, one eye on the other end of the lifeboat. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000978485
Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000982821
Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 000987810
No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001000073
I'm afraid the popularity of the domestic cat would drop very quickly if little kitty could roar its displeasure. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001002256
A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001005594
We are all born like Catholics, aren't we - in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001009840
I don't know if I saw blood before turning into Mother's arms or if I daubed it on later, in my memory, with a brush (Life of Pi 36) -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001017425
There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements ... where an animal takes a human being or another animal to be one of it's kind. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001023556
How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001033657
The truth of life is that Brahman is no different from atman, the spiritual force within us, what you might call the soul. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001035191
Reality escapes us. It's beyond description, even a simple pear. Time eats everything. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001039783
In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001043466
Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001046910
I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001059407
They would emerge a short distance away, sometimes three or four of them, a short lived archipelago of volcanic islands. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001063412
A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001074104
Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality - you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001075629
It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001075896
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001082575
I have a story that will make you believe in God. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001088271
Readers will easily recognize the cover of a book they've read, but in a cafe that man over there, is that ... is that ... well, it's hard to tell - doesn't he have long hair? - oh, he's gone. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001088325
I am magical: I can bleed for five days and not die. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001089092
Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001091999
You see these guinea pigs? Well ... they'er not dangerous. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001095377
Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001106689
Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001114393
Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them
and then they leap. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001120468
Time is an illusion that makes us all pant. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001125320
Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001135017
I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001142648
Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001144624
Whatever the reason for wanting to escape, sane or insane, zoo detractors should realize that animals don't escape to somewhere but from something. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001148299
We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001151435
My suffering left me sad and gloomy. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001164601
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud ... -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001172076
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001177272
To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001178962
The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001181286
This book was born as I was hungry. Let m eexplain. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001182129
Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001186110
I said nothing. It wasn't for fear of angering Mr. Kumar. I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001190144
Science can only take you so far and then you have to leap -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001191966
Then normal sank. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001192304
A number of my fellow religious studies majors- muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fools good for the bright- reminded me of the three toed sloth; and the three toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001194503
The sky was black and spitting rain on my smiling face. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001197164
Nil magnum nisi bonum. No greatness without goodness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001205174
A wandering corpse, a bundle of mindless functions, -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001216504
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001217779
Don't you bully me with your politeness! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001221625
I'm still learning my craft. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001233277
I concluded, that it was not a dream or a delusion or a misplaced memory or a fancy or any other falsity, but a solid, true thing witnessed while in a weakened highly agitated state. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001234091
Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001242970
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001244955
We believe what we see.' ... What do you do when you're in the dark? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001246773
A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001248279
I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001248283
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 Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001250684
First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001252184
Mamaji remembered, Father dreamed. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001252312
The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. Warehouses full of light and dust. Empty attics with a view. Coastlines. Prairies. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001256544
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001259022
Christianity is a religion in a rush. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001261070
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001262922
We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer ... then surely we are also permitted doubt. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001271447
If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001278051
I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved. What if his words had the effect of polio on me? What a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001278657
Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001283318
My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001288489
Of hunger and thirst, thirst is the greater imperative. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001291083
I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001295230
Plan Number Three: Attack Him with All Available Weaponry. Ludicrous. I wasn't Tarzan. I was a puny, feeble, vegetarian life form. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001296249
I felt like I was beating a rainbow to death. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001299536
If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001300119
If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001303819
Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001311423
How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001315246
Religion is more than rite and ritual. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001320609
I blinked deliberately, expecting my eyelids to act like lumberjacks. But the trees would not fall. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001332790
Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001336896
For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001344736
It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001347308
... nature as a whole was an exceptionally fine illustration of science. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001348770
How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001348771
Life will defend itself no matter how small it is. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001348772
I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001348773
It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaler as I grew older, train included. Now it's so small it fits in my head. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001348776
It's amazing how willpower can build walls. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001359807
My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001379933
I love Canada. It's a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001383251
You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001393762
onanists breaking a sweat on monkeys, ponies, birds; -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001399756
At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001399983
For, of course, with all animals, including us, to stare is an aggressive act. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001399994
I ask you, is it the fig tree's fault that it's not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001402728
He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001404324
What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001405007
Nevertheless, an Olympic pool is an Olympic pool, touched by immortal glory. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001436983
I am not an autobiographical writer. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001444584
Doesn't the telling of something always become a story? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001449458
There are many ways in which life's little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001449953
The cruelty of children comes as news to no one. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001453698
Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001457595
Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change . -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001478064
A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, "Stay out!" ... we say to it, "Stay in!" with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001483613
It was frightening, the extent to which a full belly made for a good mood. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001491139
But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001500019
Except that now, for having accused Ravi of an unspecified crime he hadn't committed, I was as good as dead. In years subsequent, when he was in the mood to terrorize me, he would whisper to me, Just wait till we're alone. You're the next goat! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001502085
Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it's a very limited one. And by and large, it isn't helpful. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001508456
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001511287
He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001519582
My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001522863
I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001523665
War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001524639
The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001535344
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001536530
I was as surprised as a flower that sees for the first time a bee coming towards it -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001539287
Don't worry about being good ... . Aspire to be authentic. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001540432
There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001550717
Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001570118
It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001578182
The reward for the watching eye and listening ear is great. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001589168
The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001592074
Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001592309
Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001594297
I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001596491
Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001597453
A germ of religious exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001598826
seem to bear flowers or -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001607819
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 Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001608877
Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists, -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001625990
My agency was pure and miraculous. It conferred power upon me. (pg. 223) -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001627335
The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001634425
An epic simplicity -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001638575
We believe what we see.
So did Columbus. What do you do when you're in the dark? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001641113
You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001641669
That I was a swimmer made no waves; it seems to be a law of human nature
that those who live by the sea are suspicious of swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountain climbers. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001642088
English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001642859
Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. Page 212. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001644244
Instead of coconut yam kootu, why not boiled beef tongue with a mustard sauce?"
"That sounds non-veg. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001645331
Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001648850
I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001652261
You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001656496
On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, 'Gosh, life is racing by.' But that's not it at all, it's the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001661665
The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001662815
The sun was beginning to pull the curtains on the day. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001677288
Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001682289
I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001690531
Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001690760
If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001694260
He became a champion napper. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001695620
It's not right that gentleness meet horror. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001700331
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001700558
and so it goes with God -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001712216
We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001713223
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001716053
Cinema is incredibly concise. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001718154
We are all born like Catholics ... in limbo, without religion. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001728059
You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001737601
That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001738557
Work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as things move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001751170
I began to wait. My thoughts swung wildly. I was either fixed on practical details of immediate survival or transfixed by pain, weeping silently, my mouth open and my hands on my head. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001755534
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001757583
That's the nature of grief: It's a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001758640
I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001759643
communion with God in the middle of bags of flour -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001761350
I would nearly go into convulsions of dismay at my stupidity. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001770899
Most of us get our history through story. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001773719
...for everything has a trace of the divine in it. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001775268
Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001780815
I don't know then. I wrote my book on the Holocaust without worrying about where the fucking bar code would go. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001781848
No greatness without goodness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001785588
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001788639
Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don't like. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001789253
Only fear can defeat life. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001790033
Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001791904
In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001794934
Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001802569
And I survived because I made a point of forgetting. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001804125
wild are, in practice, -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001807823
A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001810051
Things floated in the water but none that brought me hope. I could see no other lifeboats. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001815079
I went to temple at crowded times when Brahmins were too distracted to come between me and God. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001827259
The grand march of progress apparently includes the unfortunate necessity of chopping down every obstacle in its way. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001831156
When animals fight, it is with the intent to kill and with the understanding that they may be killed. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001831332
Art is rooted in joy. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001832213
The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001836799
May books spread the world over! -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001836907
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001837027
I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001840460
I was determined to move forward. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001841304
It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001844134
The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001846480
Above all, don't lose hope -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001855663
If it happened, it happened. Why should it have to mean anything? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001857861
Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001857903
Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001859452
Within the limits of their nature, they make do with what they have. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001866338
Her fear was something useless that only hampered her. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001869942
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001873199
If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure. -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001876133
Animals don't escape from somewhere but from something -- Yann Martel
Yann Martel Quotes : pic 001877324
To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive. -- Yann Martel