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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.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sometimes
Swing
Life
Swings
Pair
Pairs
Boredom
Opposites
Terror
Pendulums
Worst
Pendulum

More quotes by Yann Martel

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My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
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My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
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Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
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A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.
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We think we live in a global village. We don't. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
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No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.
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First wonder goes deepest wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.
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It's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
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Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another.
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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?
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Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
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If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?
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The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.
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It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
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It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.
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At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
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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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Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright - reminded me of the three-toed sloth and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
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Work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as things move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves.
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How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
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