Quote

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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Life
Hand
Tantamount
Attention
Dreaming
Hope
Idle
Away
Immediate
Hands
Paying
Dream
Starts
Look
Survival
Looks
Close

More quotes by Yann Martel

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Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
Yann Martel
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I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say Oh, I don't read much fiction, as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.
Yann Martel
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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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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
Yann Martel
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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
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I ask you, is it the fig tree's fault that it's not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?
Yann Martel
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If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?
Yann Martel
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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
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...animals don't escape from somewhere but from something
Yann Martel
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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Yann Martel
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Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.
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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When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
Yann Martel
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To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.
Yann Martel
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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.
Yann Martel
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Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.
Yann Martel
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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
Yann Martel
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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
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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
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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