When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
YANN MARTELThere is no doubt in my mind that that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without seeing a soul.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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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Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey.
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I’m not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don’t have a mobile. I just don’t need things. I don’t like things.
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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.
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A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
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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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How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
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You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
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It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
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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!
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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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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 am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it’s sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It’s a very laborious process, but I love doing it.
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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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Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
YANN MARTEL






