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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

More quotes by Yann Martel

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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Yann Martel
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It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.
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Religion is more than rite and ritual.
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Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
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As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
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Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.
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I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.
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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
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A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.
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If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
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Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.
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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 a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!
Yann Martel
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...animals don't escape from somewhere but from something
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
Yann Martel
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The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.
Yann Martel
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It's amazing how willpower can build walls.
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Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this.
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If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
Yann Martel
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If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Yann Martel