Yann Martel - Life Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

Yann Martel
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
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.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Here was irrefutable proof that he was using the Holocaust to speak of the extermination of animal life. Doomed creatures that could not speak for themselves were being given the voice of a most articulate people who had been similarly doomed. He was seeing the tragic fate of animals through the tragic fate of Jews. The Holocaust as allegory.

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

Yann Martel
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
He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

Yann Martel
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.

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
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

Yann Martel
Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon?... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.

Yann Martel
Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life.

Yann Martel
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

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

Yann Martel
Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

Yann Martel
It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.

Yann Martel
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.

Yann Martel
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!

Yann Martel