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In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
Yann Martel
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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
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More quotes by Yann Martel
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
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
Yann Martel
Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
Yann Martel
Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
Yann Martel
...if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.
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
It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
Yann Martel
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?
Yann Martel
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
Yann Martel
I have a story that will make you believe in God.
Yann Martel
Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.
Yann Martel
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
Yann Martel
It's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
Yann Martel
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
I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
Yann Martel
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
Yann Martel
That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
Yann Martel
We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
Yann Martel
Religion is more than rite and ritual.
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