It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.
YANN MARTELThat’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
More Yann Martel Quotes
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For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.
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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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My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
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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 went about the job in a direct way. I took the hatchet in both my hands and vigorously beat the fish on the head with the hammerhead (I still didn’t have the stomach to use the sharp edge).
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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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War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
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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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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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I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
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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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He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.
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I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
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Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
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As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one.
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We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
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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 wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.
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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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Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion – and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.
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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
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…for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
YANN MARTEL