Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Give
Catch
Littles
Fishes
Reason
Vast
Little
Throw
Giving
Answer
Question
Reptiles
Answers
Pull
Greater
Fish
More quotes by Yann Martel
If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
Yann Martel
Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
Yann Martel
I chose the name Pi because it's an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a rational understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, irrational yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.
Yann Martel
I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
Yann Martel
Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
Yann Martel
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
Yann Martel
Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.
Yann Martel
I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
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
A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.
Yann Martel
There is nothing more satisfying than having a sentence fall into place in a way you feel is right, and then adding another one and then another one. It's extraordinarily satisfying.
Yann Martel
Religion is more than rite and ritual.
Yann Martel
Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.
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
Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it's a very limited one. And by and large, it isn't helpful.
Yann Martel
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
Yann Martel
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
Yann Martel
Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.
Yann Martel
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
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