Yann Martel Quotes
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.
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
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!
I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?
The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.
Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.
I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
Work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as things move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves.
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
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?
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.
Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.
You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?
At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.
I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
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.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.
