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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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Persons
Believes
Person
Meaningful
Must
Shape
Giving
Harmony
Believe
Shapes
Things
Order
Form
Give

More quotes by Yann Martel

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It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.
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Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.
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India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
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...for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
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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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Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
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Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
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A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
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Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey.
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If you don't have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
Yann Martel
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You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!
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Time is an illusion that makes us all pant.
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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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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
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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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Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
Yann Martel
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Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.
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For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.
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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I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end.
Yann Martel