Quotes from Yann Martel

Of the river of time, he worries neither about its spring nor its delta.

I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen

It's a big ocean crossed by busy ships. I went slowly, observing much.

I believed him. (Ravi was a merciless teaser. The first time he called Mamaji "Mr. Fish" to my face I left a banana peel in his bed.)

But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose.

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?

I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.

And so, when she heard if Hare Krishnas, she didn't hear right. She heard Hairless Christians, and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her in fact she was not so wrong; that 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.

just beyond the ticket booth father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? an arrow pointed to a small curtain. there were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at that curtain that we had to replace it regularly. behind it was a mirror

I looked up. I couldn't see him. He was hiding at the bottom of the boat. He appeared when he threw my mother's body overboard. His mouth was red. The water boiled with fish.

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!

A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

ineluctably.

Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core. My hands naturally come together in reverent worship.

So I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939. I

If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won't wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why would an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative?

a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.

What if his words had the effect of polio on me? WHat a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man.

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

Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals

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.