Home > Author > Yann Martel
61 " A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. "
― Yann Martel
62 " Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense. "
― Yann Martel , Beatrice and Virgil
63 " Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. 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. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. "
― Yann Martel , Life of Pi
64 " 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. "
65 " I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. "
66 " We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more--there is no greater relationship. "
― Yann Martel , The High Mountains of Portugal
67 " 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? "
68 " 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. "
69 " The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim. "
70 " When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. "
71 " If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer. "
72 " 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. "
73 " Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end. "
74 " Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry. "
75 " For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. "
76 " For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. "
77 " When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite. "
― Yann Martel , Self
78 " My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described. "
79 " Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can get. "
80 " The holy word is story, and story is the holy word. "