Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
YANN MARTELI wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.
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Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
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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.
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It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
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A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
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It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.
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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.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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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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I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
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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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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.
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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.
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
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A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal – of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania – but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place.
YANN MARTEL