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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

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Direct
Unexpected
Vertigo
Known
Fears
Rapid
Upon
Reactions
Rapids
Read
Add
Killer
Two
Noise
Killers
Cannot
Third
Trained
Would
Thirds
Reaction
Like
Hearing
Wit
Startle

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When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
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Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.
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There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.
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Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
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If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?
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My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions.
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Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
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I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
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Religion is more than rite and ritual.
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A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.
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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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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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Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in the trade.
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There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
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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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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.
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The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
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I love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.
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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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