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When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Survival
Terrible
Sense
Life
Blunted
Threatened
Empathy
Selfish
Hunger

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I have a story that will make you believe in God.
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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
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Bapu Gandhi said, ‘All religions are true.’ I just want to love God.
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It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
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The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.
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Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
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Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?
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We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
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The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
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[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.
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The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
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I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
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I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer
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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.
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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.
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...if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.
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I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.
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A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
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My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
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