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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
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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
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Without
Species
Inexplicable
Sometimes
Strange
Adapt
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Ways
Contain
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Ability
Moves
Would
Moving
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Survive
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Madness
Adaptability
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Parcel
More quotes by 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
I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
Yann Martel
A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
Yann Martel
[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
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God
Yann Martel
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Yann Martel
Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
Yann Martel
A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.
Yann Martel
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
Yann Martel
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
Yann Martel
My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
Yann Martel
Most people take who they are, naturally, as a given, and they're interested in the sexual other, but not in being the sexual other. Most men are interested in women - whether sexually or not is not the question - but they don't necessarily want to be a woman.
Yann Martel
Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.
Yann Martel
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
My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
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
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
But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.
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
Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.
Yann Martel