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Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dancing
Fields
Cold
Words
Understand
Sprites
Trying
Toads
Muddy
Field

More quotes by Yann Martel

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The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.
Yann Martel
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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
Yann Martel
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It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
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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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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There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.
Yann Martel
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Time is an illusion that makes us all pant.
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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I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Yann Martel
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To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.
Yann Martel
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I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
Yann Martel
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You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long.
Yann Martel
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
Yann Martel
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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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In a movie, you need good actors, whereas in a book, you don't, unless you have a really bad imagination. In a book, your imagination will do the acting for you. Also, the process of revelation is often different. Tension is achieved in a different way.
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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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.
Yann Martel
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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?
Yann Martel
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Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
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