Quotes from Yann Martel

Now comes the difficult part: you must provoke the animal that is afflicting you. Tiger, rhinoceros, ostrich, wild boar, brown bear- no matter the beast, you must get its goat.

I knew very little about the religion. [Christianity] It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools.

seem to bear flowers or

I can well imagine that somewhere far off, 150 miles away, a ship's watch looked up, startled, and later reported the oddest thing, that he thought he heard a cat's meow coming from three o'clock. Days

The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited

I'll tell you, that's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let it go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said, but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day.

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...

Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.

Evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.

Then the elderly man said, "I have a story that will make you believe in God.

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God? After that meeting the matter ends for most of us. If there is a change, it is usually for the lesser rather than the greater; many people seem to lose God along life's way.

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific Ocean and I hope that my telling of his tale does not disappoint him.

onanists breaking a sweat on monkeys, ponies, birds;

She looked beautiful. And sad. For she was leaving India, India of the heat and monsoons, of rice fields and the Cauvery River, of coastlines and stone temples, of bullock carts and colourful trucks, of friends and known shopkeepers, of Nehru Street and Goubert Salai, of this and that, India so familiar to her and loved by her.

But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.

Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

except for the breathing

There are many ways in which life's little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all.

How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.

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.

Moving a zoo is like moving a city.

Whereas before the road, the sea, the trees, the airm the sun all spoke differently to me, now they spoke one language od unity. Tree took account of road, which was aware of air, which was mindful of sea, which shares things with sun. Every element lived in harmonious relation with its neighbor, and all was with and kin. I knelt a mortal; I arose an immortal. I felt like that centre of a small circle coinciding with the centre of a much larger one. Batman met Allah

It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness.