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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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  In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

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  My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

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  A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

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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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  Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.

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  We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.

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  To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches.

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  Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.

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  I would have like PI to be a Jew, too, to practice Judaism, but there are two religions that are explicitly incompatible: Christianity and Judaism. Where one begins, the other ends, according to Christians, and where one endures, the other strays, according to Jews.

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  Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.

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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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  It’s hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it’s hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

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  Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?

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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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  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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  There are animals we haven’t stopped by. Don’t think they’re harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

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