Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life.
YANN MARTELI know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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It’s hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it’s hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
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I would have like PI to be a Jew, too, to practice Judaism, but there are two religions that are explicitly incompatible: Christianity and Judaism. Where one begins, the other ends, according to Christians, and where one endures, the other strays, according to Jews.
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Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!
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That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
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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.
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Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.
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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.
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War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
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When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
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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.
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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
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The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
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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.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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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.
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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. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing–I’m sorry, I would rather not go on.
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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
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If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?
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Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven says. Even on a symbolic lovel, that’s creation in frenzy.
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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.
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Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
YANN MARTEL