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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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  If you don’t have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?

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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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• 

  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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• 

  It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

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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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• 

  The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

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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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• 

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

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• 

  The dorado did the most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold, and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.

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• 

  I ask you, is it the fig tree’s fault that it’s not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?

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• 

  Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.

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• 

  First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.

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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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