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 MARTELCome 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.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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.
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I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare.
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
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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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We don’t want any invention. We want the ‘straight facts,’ as you say in English.” Isn’t telling about something–using words, English or Japanese–already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something of an invention?
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Music is a bird’s answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
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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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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.
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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.
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My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.
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You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
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He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.
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The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
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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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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.
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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.
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I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
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I chose the name Pi because it’s an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a “rational” understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, “irrational” yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.
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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.
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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.
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Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
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Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!
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We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
YANN MARTEL