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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness–how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!

Yann Martel

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More Yann Martel Quotes

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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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• 

  Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

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• 

  We think we live in a global village. We don’t. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.

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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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• 

  Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness–how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!

  YANN MARTEL
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• 

  For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.

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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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• 

  Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.

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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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• 

  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?

  YANN MARTEL
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• 

  Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.

  YANN MARTEL
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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.

  YANN MARTEL
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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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