Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it’s a very limited one. And by and large, it isn’t helpful.
YANN MARTELIn a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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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War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
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How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.
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Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them — and then they leap.
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It’s amazing how willpower can build walls.
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
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We are all born like Catholics, aren’t we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
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The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?
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…for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
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Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.
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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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Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
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We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.
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In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
YANN MARTEL