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A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
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More quotes by Yann Martel

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How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
Yann Martel
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War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
Yann Martel
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My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
Yann Martel
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High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Yann Martel
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You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Yann Martel
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At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Yann Martel
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To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.
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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No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.
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.
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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Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality - you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.
Yann Martel
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I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Yann Martel
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I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.
Yann Martel
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Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? ... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.
Yann Martel
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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.
Yann Martel
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There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
Yann Martel
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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.
Yann Martel
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
Yann Martel
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My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quiet and introspective - did something to soothe my shattered self.
Yann Martel