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There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Always
Failing
People
Outside
Realize
Inside
Realizing
Upon
Defended
Take
Defend
Must
Fail

More quotes by Yann Martel

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I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.
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My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
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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.
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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
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
Yann Martel
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There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
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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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
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I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.
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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.
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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.
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If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
Yann Martel
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If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.
Yann Martel
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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
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That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
Yann Martel
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The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Yann Martel
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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
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Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.
Yann Martel
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I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end.
Yann Martel
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High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Yann Martel