Yann Martel famous quotes

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
-- Yann Martel

#Baseball #Sex #Drinking

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
-- Yann Martel

#Life #Philosophy #Mean

If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
-- Yann Martel

#Prayer #Philosophy #Moving

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.
-- Yann Martel

#Anger #Heart #Evil

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud...
-- Yann Martel

#Life #Beautiful #Jealous

I've never forgotten him. 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. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.
-- Yann Martel

#Goodbye #Dream #Pain

Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
-- Yann Martel

#Misery #Madness #Company

The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
-- Yann Martel

#Mind #Want #Soar

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.
-- Yann Martel

#People #Realizing #Failing

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Mean #Reality #Play

It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
-- Yann Martel

#Letting Go #Important #Importance

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
-- Yann Martel

#Gratitude #Grateful #Ocean

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.
-- Yann Martel

#Clever #Self #Law

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
-- Yann Martel

#Stories #Noise #Painting

I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
-- Yann Martel

#Country #Intelligent #People

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. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end.
-- Yann Martel

#Giving Up #Loss #Fighting

I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
-- Yann Martel

#Expression #Grace #Earth

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Letting Go #Opening Up #Faith In God

The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
-- Yann Martel

#Rewards #Finest #Presence Of God

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. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
-- Yann Martel

#Memories #Fear #Real

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
-- Yann Martel

#Zoos #Animal #Men

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Karma #Our Actions #Way

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
-- Yann Martel

#Catholic #Introducing #Figures

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.
-- Yann Martel

#Loneliness #Eye #Gay

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
-- Yann Martel

#Art #Thinking #World

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. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.
-- Yann Martel

#Real #Emotional #Fiction

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Dream #Hands #Survival

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Music #Dream #Appreciation

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
-- Yann Martel

#Sad #Pain #Unbearable

My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.
-- Yann Martel

#Book #Eye #Long

The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.
-- Yann Martel

#Struggle #Expression #Water

If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
-- Yann Martel

#Life #Believe #Love Is

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?
-- Yann Martel

#Life #Travel #Understanding

These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy...walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, 'Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.
-- Yann Martel

#Children #Thinking #People

You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
-- Yann Martel

#Hope #Thinking #Might

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
-- Yann Martel

#Names #Sometimes

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Dream #Heart #Missing

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. 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

#Mother #Brother #Sorry

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
-- Yann Martel

#Opponents #Defeat

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
-- Yann Martel

#Swings #Opposites #Boredom

When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.
-- Yann Martel

#Dog #Atheist #Pain

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
-- Yann Martel

#Reality #Essence #Fiction

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

#Life #Realization #Principles

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Letting Go #Goodbye #Hurt

I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and to do too little. 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.
-- Yann Martel

#Dream #Mistake #Hands

If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?
-- Yann Martel

#Sky #Passports

Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.
-- Yann Martel

#Zoos #Wall #Father

We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?
-- Yann Martel

#Believe #Dark

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Thinking #Wonder #Moments

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
-- Yann Martel

#Beautiful #Challenges #Brotherhood

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Country #Writing #People

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
-- Yann Martel

#Inspiring #Graduation #Cheer Up

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Letting Go #Heart #Important

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

#Risk #Reason #Throwing

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.
-- Yann Martel

#Agony #Suffering #Next

If you stumble over mere believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe? Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater
-- Yann Martel

#Believe #Love Is #Life Is Hard

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
-- Yann Martel

#Inspirational #Moving #Saving

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
-- Yann Martel

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!
-- Yann Martel

#Views #Vastness #Tiny

In 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. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.
-- Yann Martel

#Taken #Years #Broken

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.
-- Yann Martel

#Real #Emotional #Fiction