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The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Something
Way
Travel
Bring
Make
Understanding
Life
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World
Understand
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Stories

More quotes by Yann Martel

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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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When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
Yann Martel
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My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
Yann Martel
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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
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
Yann Martel
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Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
Yann Martel
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I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
Yann Martel
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I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
Yann Martel
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My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
Yann Martel
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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.
Yann Martel
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I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
Yann Martel
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If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
Yann Martel
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Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.
Yann Martel
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You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Yann Martel
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Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!
Yann Martel
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Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
Yann Martel
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People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.
Yann Martel
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Gloom is but a shadow of a cloud passing by
Yann Martel
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The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
Yann Martel
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Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
Yann Martel