Yann Martel Quotes

And so, when she heard if Hare Krishnas, she didn't hear right. She heard "Hairless Christians", and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.
Yann Martel
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.
Yann Martel
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Yann Martel
A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.
Yann Martel
So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?
Yann Martel
Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.
Yann Martel
Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells
Yann Martel
...he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch.
Yann Martel
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
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
Yann Martel
There are many ways in which life's little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all.
Yann Martel
I did not grasp all these details - and many more - right away. They came to my notice with time and as a result of necessity. I would be in the direst of dire straits, facing a bleak future, when some small thing, some detail, would transform itself and appear in my mind in a new light. It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life. This happened time and again. How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.
Yann Martel
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
Yann Martel
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in a strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
Yann Martel
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
Yann Martel
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
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
Yann Martel
But it was hard, oh, it was hard. 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. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation, and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
Yann Martel
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. 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. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.
Yann Martel
I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. 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
It's not atheists who get stuck in my caw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as means of transportation.
Yann Martel
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
In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
Yann Martel
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
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
Yann Martel
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.
Yann Martel
I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...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
The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
Yann Martel
As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
Yann Martel
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. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day.
Yann Martel
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.
Yann Martel
The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.
Yann Martel
Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.
Yann Martel
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.
Yann Martel
I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.
Yann Martel
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
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
What is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities - the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net of there's so little fish to catch?
Yann Martel
My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all.
Yann Martel
A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.
Yann Martel
Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?
Yann Martel
Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
Yann Martel
My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
Yann Martel
There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
Yann Martel
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious
Yann Martel
It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspiciousof swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountainclimbers.
Yann Martel
The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.
Yann Martel
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can get.
Yann Martel
My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
Yann Martel
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
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
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
Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.
Yann Martel
Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end.
Yann Martel
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
Yann Martel
If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer.
Yann Martel
When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
Yann Martel
The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.
Yann Martel
Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.
Yann Martel
What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?
Yann Martel