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Yann Martel Quotes
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My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
Yann Martel
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Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
Yann Martel
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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
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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
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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!
Yann Martel
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I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek.
Yann Martel
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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
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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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Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright - reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
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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.
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As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
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I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
Yann Martel
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It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.
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Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness...
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If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go! - do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel.
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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.
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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.
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My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quiet and introspective - did something to soothe my shattered self.
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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?
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
Yann Martel
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How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
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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.
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Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.
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If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you!
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There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
Yann Martel
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Quote of the day
Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth.
John Lyly
Yann Martel
Creative Commons
Born:
June 25, 1963
(age 60)
Bio:
Yann Martel is a Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, a #1 international bestseller published in more than 50 territories.
Known for:
Life of Pi (2001)
The High Mountains of Portugal (2016)
Beatrice and Virgil (2010)
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (1993)
Most used words:
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god
animals
story
love
hard
death
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art
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