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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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Religious
Miracle
Sloth
Three
Gold
Reminded
Didn
Number
Mixed
Beautiful
Fool
Studies
Reason
Students
Bright
Toed
Sometimes
Example
Fellow
Thrall
Way
Numbers
Fellows
Agnostics
Life
Study
Majors
Muddled

More quotes by Yann Martel

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I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
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I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
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Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
Yann Martel
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I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.
Yann Martel
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First wonder goes deepest wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.
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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.
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A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.
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I ask you, is it the fig tree's fault that it's not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?
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Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.
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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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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Time is an illusion that makes us all pant.
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 gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
Yann Martel
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I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
Yann Martel
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If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless 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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The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God
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
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It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.
Yann Martel