Yann Martel Quotes

When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

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.

My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers.

Why can’t reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there’s so little fish to catch?

If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?