Quote

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Using
Telling
Already
Looking
Upon
Words
Japanese
Something
Invention
World
English

More quotes by Yann Martel

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I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.
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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.
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For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.
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Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in the trade.
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My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
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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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It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.
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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.
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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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Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
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When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
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Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.
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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.
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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.
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If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.
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Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.
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Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
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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.
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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. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
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