Quote

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
Giving
Harmony
Believe
Shapes
Things
Order
Form
Give
Persons
Believes
Person
Meaningful
Must
Shape

More quotes by Yann Martel

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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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I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
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
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To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
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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...if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.
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.
Yann Martel
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It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaler as I grew older, train included. Now it's so small it fits in my head.
Yann Martel
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Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
Yann Martel
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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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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
Yann Martel
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If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
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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I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
Yann Martel
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When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
Yann Martel
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There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.
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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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.
Yann Martel
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I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.
Yann Martel
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If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
Yann Martel