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Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

Yann Martel

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?
YANN MARTEL

Belief Believe Book Life
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 MARTEL

Beautiful Garden Thinking
We don’t want any invention. We want the ‘straight facts,’ as you say in English.” Isn’t telling about something–using words, English or Japanese–already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something of an invention?
YANN MARTEL

Country Invention Language People Some Something
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 language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
YANN MARTEL

Book Cinema Different
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.
YANN MARTEL

Country Reading Reality
You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!
YANN MARTEL

Believe May Moving
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life.
YANN MARTEL

Life Lifeboat
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
YANN MARTEL

Gloomy Left Suffering
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
YANN MARTEL

Mind People Stories
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.
YANN MARTEL

Inspirational Life Principles
I ask you, is it the fig tree’s fault that it’s not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?
YANN MARTEL

Faults Kind Tree
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.
YANN MARTEL

Father Guidance Lose Supports
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

Despair Expression Light
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
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
YANN MARTEL

Beats Reason Risk

Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

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Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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