Yann Martel - Life of Pi (2001)

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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
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
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.

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.

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 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
There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.

Yann Martel
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.

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

Yann Martel
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?

Yann Martel