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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
Yann Martel
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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
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Couldn
Life
Pieces
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Higher
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Lifeboat
Lifeboats
Games
Stakes
Simple
Chess
Ends
Elements
Much
More quotes by Yann Martel
My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
Yann Martel
My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quiet and introspective - did something to soothe my shattered self.
Yann Martel
I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
Yann Martel
Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
Yann Martel
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
How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
Yann Martel
Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.
Yann Martel
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
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
The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits.
Yann Martel
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!
Yann Martel
It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.
Yann Martel
We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
Yann Martel
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
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. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
Yann Martel
Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
Yann Martel
No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.
Yann Martel
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Yann Martel
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
Yann Martel
The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
Yann Martel