Quote

I ask you, is it the fig tree's fault that it's not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?

Yann Martel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Innocent
Seasons
Faults
Tree
Figs
Asks
Wither
Thing
Instantly
Kind
Fault
Season

More quotes by Yann Martel

Image
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
Image
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.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
Yann Martel
Image
Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in the trade.
Yann Martel
Image
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
Yann Martel
Image
India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
Yann Martel
Image
I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
Yann Martel
Image
I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?
Yann Martel
Image
I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say Oh, I don't read much fiction, as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.
Yann Martel
Image
But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.
Yann Martel
Image
[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality - you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
Yann Martel