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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.

Yann Martel

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

Beens City Evil People
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

Tiny Vastness Views
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.
YANN MARTEL

Faith Go God Letting Opening Up
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
YANN MARTEL

Ambition Art Skulls
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
YANN MARTEL

Boredom Opposites Swings
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 MARTEL

Dark Moon Stars
India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
YANN MARTEL

Country Imagination Love Possible
I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
YANN MARTEL

Earth Expression Grace
I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
YANN MARTEL

Beautiful Mosques Sunday
We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
YANN MARTEL

Animals Men Zoos
If you don’t have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
YANN MARTEL

Dream Ideas Reality
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.
YANN MARTEL

Moments Thinking Wonder
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
YANN MARTEL

Element Games Simple
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.
YANN MARTEL

Animal Course Jail Tanzania Zoos
Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
YANN MARTEL

Afrerwards God Over
Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.
YANN MARTEL

Astonishing Frightening Indignation
For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.
YANN MARTEL

End Fear Memories Real
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
YANN MARTEL

Allies Decision Over You
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
YANN MARTEL

Communication Novelists Pages
Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
YANN MARTEL

Heart Sea Wind
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
YANN MARTEL

Book Life Names Sometimes
I 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.
YANN MARTEL

Language Perfection Sea Water
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
YANN MARTEL

Gloomy Left Suffering
You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long.
YANN MARTEL

Joy Long Measure Pain
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.
YANN MARTEL

Art Book Inspired
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
YANN MARTEL

Baby Cancer Death Life
You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!
YANN MARTEL

Believe May Moving

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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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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Popular Authors

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