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 MARTELEverything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it’s like to be a woman doesn’t strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.
YANN MARTEL -
I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
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I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others – and I am one of those – never give up. We fight and fight and fight.
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I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life.
YANN MARTEL -
I am reminded of a story of Lord Krishna when he was a cowherd. Every night he invites the milkmaids to dance with him in the forest. They come and they dance. The night is dark, the fire in their midst roars and crackles, the beat of the music gets ever faster.
YANN MARTEL -
science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
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I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl’s kiss on your cheek.
YANN MARTEL -
The dorado did the most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold, and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.
YANN MARTEL -
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 -
Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they’re all we have.
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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.
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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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Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
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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.
YANN MARTEL