Yann Martel Quotes (77 Quotes)

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

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

Christianity is a religion in a rush.

I went to temple at crowded times when Brahmins were too distracted to come between me and God.

Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.

The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.

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 if there's so little fish to catch?

Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another.

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

My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions.

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.

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.

First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.

The main battlefield of good is not the open ground of the publis arena, but the small clearing of each heart.

You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?

For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.

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.

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.

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.

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

My greatest wish -- other than salvation -- was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.

The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.

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