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.
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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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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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
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People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar.
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Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.
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War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
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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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It’s amazing how willpower can build walls.
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Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality – you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.
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My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
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It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.
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My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
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Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it’s true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
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There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God… These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.
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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 is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion.
YANN MARTEL