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 MARTELHow long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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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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.
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My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
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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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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
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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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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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We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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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.
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Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
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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 is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
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We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.
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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