Yann Martel Quotes
-
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?
-
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
-
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.
-
I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
-
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
-
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.
-
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
-
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.
-
Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
-
If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.