Yann Martel Quotes

Come aboard if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.

We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view.

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of
brotherhood and devotion.

The mosque was truly an open construction, to God and to breeze. We sat cross-legged
listening to the imam until the time came to pray. Then the random pattern of sitters disappeared as
we stood and arranged ourselves shoulder to shoulder in rows, every space ahead being filled by
someone from behind until every line was solid and we were row after row of worshippers. It felt
good to bring my forehead to the ground. Immediately it felt like a deeply religious contact.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar — the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

You may be astonished that in such a short period of time I could go from weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado. I could explain it by arguing that profiting from a pitiful flying fish’s navigational mistake made me shy and sorrowful, while the excitement of actively capturing a great dorado made me sanguinary and self-assured. But in point of fact the explanation lies elsewhere. It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.

The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

This story has a happy ending.

The truth of life is that Brahman is no different from atman, the spiritual force within us, what you might call the soul.

A zoo is a cultural institution. Like a public library, like a museum, it is at the service of popular education and science. And by that token, not much of a money-making venture for the Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims.

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.

Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof.

Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

يمكن أن يعتاد المرء على أي شيء، بما في ذلك القتل.