Quote

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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Doe
Havens
Live
Haven
Literature
Feel
Pain
Imaginatively
Feels
Making
Ideologues
Thing
Lives
Empathetic
Makes
Empathy
Others
Skins

More quotes by Yann Martel

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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.
Yann Martel
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Don’t worry about being good…. Aspire to be authentic.
Yann Martel
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Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
Yann Martel
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A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
Yann Martel
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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.
Yann Martel
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It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.
Yann Martel
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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.
Yann Martel
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My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
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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That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
Yann Martel
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We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
Yann Martel
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Religion is more than rite and ritual.
Yann Martel
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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
Yann Martel
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A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.
Yann Martel
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Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
Yann Martel
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Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
Yann Martel
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How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
Yann Martel
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What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.
Yann Martel
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I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
Yann Martel
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There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
Yann Martel