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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

Related Topics

TinyVastnessViews

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More Yann Martel Quotes

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  A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal – of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania – but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place.

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• 

  Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?

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• 

  We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.

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  Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

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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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• 

  The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

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• 

  Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

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• 

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

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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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• 

  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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• 

  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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• 

  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?

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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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