Top 100 Martel In Quotes
#1. Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans. Yann Martel in Life of Pi, Page 25
Yann Martel
#2. In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It
George Friedman
#3. It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.
Yann Martel
#4. In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
Yann Martel
#5. What quantities evil - the amount of blood spilled the body count, the intentional destruction of innocent masses? Regardless of how evil is defined, there will always be those in power to discriminately judge it and their corrupt policing forces that enforce it.
Mahima Martel
#6. I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while.
Yann Martel
#7. I'm just trying to help"
"Do your uncle's bonsai eat meat?"
"I don't think so"
"Have you ever been bitten by one of his bonsai?"
"No."
"In that case, your uncle's bonsai are not helping us
Yann Martel
#8. A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.
Yann Martel
#9. Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.
Yann Martel
#10. [T]o be a castaway is to be caught up in grim and exhausting opposites.
Yann Martel
#11. Without doubt, in animation each frame is important, every movement defines the character.
Lucrecia Martel
#12. 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
#13. What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?
Yann Martel
#14. I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
Yann Martel
#15. communion with God in the middle of bags of flour
Yann Martel
#16. If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?
Yann Martel
#17. Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
Yann Martel
#18. I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
Yann Martel
#19. The consumption of information, films, music has been changing in recent decades. It's hard to know what will become the film that can not easily reach [audiences].
Lucrecia Martel
#20. Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times - that is, hard - had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.
Yann Martel
#21. What is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities - the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net of there's so little fish to catch?
Yann Martel
#22. 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.
Yann Martel
#23. 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
#24. I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both.
Yann Martel
#25. I'm the worst critic about music myself. I hardly ever, every like something the first time I listen to it. So I've got to put myself in other people's shoes.
Marc Martel
#26. Isn't it ironic, Richard Parker? We're in hell yet still we're afraid of immortality
Yann Martel
#27. The grand march of progress apparently includes the unfortunate necessity of chopping down every obstacle in its way.
Yann Martel
#28. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
Yann Martel
#29. Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.
Yann Martel
#30. Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.
Yann Martel
#31. I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me.
Yann Martel
#32. I have a story that will make you believe in God.
Yann Martel
#33. We are all born like Catholics, aren't we - in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
Yann Martel
#34. I don't know if I saw blood before turning into Mother's arms or if I daubed it on later, in my memory, with a brush (Life of Pi 36)
Yann Martel
#35. First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.
Yann Martel
#36. There are many ways in which life's little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all.
Yann Martel
#37. No one can escape slavery; we are all slaves in some regards. We are slaves to our parent's expectations. We are slaves to the pressures of our peers. We are slaves to our own ideologies and faiths.
Mahima Martel
#38. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
Yann Martel
#39. A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.
Yann Martel
#40. A number of my fellow religious studies majors- muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fools good for the bright- reminded me of the three toed sloth; and the three toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
Yann Martel
#41. Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?
Yann Martel
#42. I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
Yann Martel
#43. I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.
Yann Martel
#44. We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be.
Yann Martel
#45. A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction
besides unexpected interludes
has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.
Yann Martel
#46. In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season.
Yann Martel
#47. Everything in me, right down to the pores of my skin, was expressing joy.
Yann Martel
#48. I am fairly optimistic about the disillusionment that produces homogeneity in general. The films that succeed in [theaters] are fairly homogeneous in terms of narrative and vision of the world.
Lucrecia Martel
#49. Readers will easily recognize the cover of a book they've read, but in a cafe that man over there, is that ... is that ... well, it's hard to tell - doesn't he have long hair? - oh, he's gone.
Yann Martel
#50. 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
#51. The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord's hand holding me up.
Yann Martel
#52. 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.
Yann Martel
#53. In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
Yann Martel
#54. I sang that tree's glory, its solid, unhurried purity, its slow beauty. Oh, that I could be like it, rooted to the ground but with my every hand raised up to God in praise!
Yann Martel
#55. Yes! Practice-singular!' the wise men screamed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point (Life of Pi 68).
Yann Martel
#56. And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.
Yann Martel
#57. ...for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
Yann Martel
#58. It's not atheists who get stuck in my caw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we ... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as means of transportation.
Yann Martel
#59. For example
I wonder
could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I'll tell you, that's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way that number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
Yann Martel
#60. We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
Yann Martel
#61. I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
Yann Martel
#62. I quite deliberately dressed wild animals in tame costumes of my imagination.
Yann Martel
#63. I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.
Yann Martel
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I said nothing. It wasn't for fear of angering Mr. Kumar. I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved.
Yann Martel
#69. It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life. This happened time and again.
Yann Martel
#70. Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilerated speechlessness.
Yann Martel
#71. The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?
Yann Martel
#72. When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
Yann Martel
#73. Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals
Yann Martel
#74. The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.
Yann Martel
#75. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.
Yann Martel
#76. Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? The
Yann Martel
#77. In my experience, a castaway's worst mistake is to hope too much and to do too little.
Yann Martel
#78. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.
Yann Martel
#80. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.
Yann Martel
#81. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer ... then surely we are also permitted doubt.
Yann Martel
#82. Religion?" Mr Kumar grinned broadly. "I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness.
Yann Martel
#83. Time passes, like clouds in the sky. Weeks and months go by as if they were a single day. Summer fades to fall, winter yields to spring, different minutes of the same hour.
Martel, Yann
#84. We believe what we see.' ... What do you do when you're in the dark?
Yann Martel
#85. If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
Yann Martel
#86. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.
Yann Martel
#87. War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
Yann Martel
#88. A name is only what others want you to believe." He pauses, hoping that the pause will let the meaning sink in. "I am what I am, not what others would have you believe." Martel smiles. "And a pleasant evening to you all.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#89. I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.
Yann Martel
#90. Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.
Yann Martel
#91. 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
#92. We think we live in a global village. We don't. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
Yann Martel
#93. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
Yann Martel
#94. There people fail to realise that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. - Pi Patel in Life of Pi
Yann Martel
#95. 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
#96. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud ...
Yann Martel
#97. Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.
Yann Martel
#98. Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
Yann Martel
#99. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others.
Yann Martel
#100. Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.
Yann Martel
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