Yann Martel Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.”
-- Yann Martel

#Baseball #Sex #Drinking
“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
-- Yann Martel

#Life #Philosophy #Mean
“If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
-- Yann Martel

#Prayer #Philosophy #Moving
“These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.”
-- Yann Martel

#Anger #Heart #Evil
“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

#Life #Beautiful #Jealous
“I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.”
-- Yann Martel

#Goodbye #Dream #Pain
“Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.”
-- Yann Martel

#Misery #Madness #Company
“The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.”
-- Yann Martel

#Mind #Want #Soar
“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.”
-- Yann Martel

#People #Realizing #Failing
“Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.”
-- Yann Martel

#Mean #Reality #Play
“It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.”
-- Yann Martel

#Letting Go #Important #Importance
“My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.”
-- Yann Martel

#Gratitude #Grateful #Ocean
“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.”
-- Yann Martel

#Clever #Self #Law
“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

#Stories #Noise #Painting
“I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.”
-- Yann Martel

#Country #Intelligent #People
“I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end.”
-- Yann Martel

#Giving Up #Loss #Fighting
“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

#Expression #Grace #Earth
“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

#Letting Go #Opening Up #Faith In God
“The presence of God is the finest of rewards.”
-- Yann Martel

#Rewards #Finest #Presence Of God
“For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
-- Yann Martel

#Memories #Fear #Real
“We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.”
-- Yann Martel

#Zoos #Animal #Men
“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.”
-- Yann Martel

#Karma #Our Actions #Way
“We are all born like Catholics, aren't weâ€”in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?”
-- Yann Martel

#Catholic #Introducing #Figures
“As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.”
-- Yann Martel

#Loneliness #Eye #Gay
“I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.”
-- Yann Martel

#Art #Thinking #World
“Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.”
-- Yann Martel

#Real #Emotional #Fiction
“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

#Dream #Hands #Survival
“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”
-- Yann Martel

#Music #Dream #Appreciation
“When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”
-- Yann Martel

#Sad #Pain #Unbearable
“My greatest wish â€” other than salvation â€” 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.”
-- Yann Martel

#Book #Eye #Long

Top 250 Yann Martel Quotes 2021 Update Quotefancy

Top 250 Yann Martel Quotes 2021 Update Quotefancy

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