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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
Terrible
Sense
Life
Blunted
Threatened
Empathy
Selfish
Hunger
Survival

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If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.
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I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
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As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
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If you don't have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
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For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.
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Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you.
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
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The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
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Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
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I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.
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Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.
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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.
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But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.
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There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
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As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one.
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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.
Yann Martel
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Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!
Yann Martel
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Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.
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In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
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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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