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.
YANN MARTELI 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.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.
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For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.
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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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Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they’re all we have.
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It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
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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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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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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
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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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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
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The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life.
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I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It’s a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
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I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving.
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We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
YANN MARTEL