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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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Keeping
Beats
Risk
Universe
Bathwater
Away
Excessively
Reason
Tigers
Nothing
Throwing
Reasonable

More quotes by Yann Martel

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Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.
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All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
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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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Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven says. Even on a symbolic lovel, that's creation in frenzy.
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The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.
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What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.
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To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
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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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It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
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He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
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The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
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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.
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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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Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
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In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
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I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.
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I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.
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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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My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
Yann Martel