Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
YANN MARTELThe 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.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.
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Don’t you bully me with your politeness!
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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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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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.
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You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
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You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long.
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The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
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Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they’re all we have.
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The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
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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.
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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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It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
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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?
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I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
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One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.
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Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
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First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.
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We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
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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.
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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.
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My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
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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.
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I can well imagine an athiest’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” – and the deathbed leap of faith.
YANN MARTEL