Quote

The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Thinking
Animal
Around
Ferocious
Certain
Embody
Might
Embodied
Humans
Tigers
Mind
Etc
Way
Traits
Think
Animals

More quotes by Yann Martel

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People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.
Yann Martel
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Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
Yann Martel
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A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.
Yann Martel
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If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Yann Martel
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Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.
Yann Martel
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There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
Yann Martel
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My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Yann Martel
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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.
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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Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.
Yann Martel
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Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!
Yann Martel
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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Yann Martel
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[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
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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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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A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.
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.
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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It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
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