When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival. - Yann Martel

"Religion?" Mr Kumar grinned broadly. "I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness."

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.

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.