Yann Martel Quotes

131 Sourced Quotes

My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.

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

Yann Martel
Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
Yann Martel

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

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. 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
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
If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without seeing a soul.

Yann Martel
I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.

Yann Martel
I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.

Yann Martel
Don't you bully me with your politeness! 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
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
It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaler as I grew older, train included. Now it's so small it fits in my head.

Yann Martel
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
You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won't be for long.

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

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

Yann Martel
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.

Yann Martel
My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book.

Yann Martel
If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you!

Yann Martel
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
As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

Yann Martel
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
It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.

Yann Martel
Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness...

Yann Martel