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

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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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  He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

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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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  I can well imagine an athiest’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” – and the deathbed leap of faith.

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  It’s amazing how willpower can build walls.

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  The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

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  If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?

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  Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.

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  Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them — and then they leap.

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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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  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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  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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  Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.

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  How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?

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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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