Quotes from Yann Martel

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. It may be nothing more than life-hungry stupidity.

There are those who take upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless

Agama bukan sekadar ritual dan tata cara. Ada makna di balik ritual dan tata cara itu.

The feeling, a paradoxical mix of pulsing energy and profound peace

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.

Do you see the invisible spirals on the margins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out

people move in the hope of a better life

When animals fight, it is with the intent to kill and with the understanding that they may be killed.

When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me—it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us.

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing. The sight brings on an oppressive sadness that no car about to hit you or water about to drown you can match. The feeling is truly unbearable.

Richard Parker has stayed with me. I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. That pain is like an axe that chops at my heart.

wild are, in practice

I noticed how those who know the truth are always treated with suspicion and disdain. That was the case with Jesus, of course. But look at old Miss Marple. Always she knows, and everyone is surprised that she does. And the same with Hercule Poirot. How can that ridiculous little man know anything? But he does, he does. It is the triumph of the meek, in Agatha Christie as in the Gospels.

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 every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.

If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt.

Except that now, for having accused Ravi of an unspecified crime he hadn't committed, I was as good as dead. In years subsequent, when he was in the mood to terrorize me, he would whisper to me, Just wait till we're alone. You're the next goat!

It's not right that gentleness meet horror.

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing—I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.

hole. The temperature climbed.

Look: Christ on the Cross died of suffocation, but His only complaint was of thirst. If thirst can be so taxing that even God Incarnate complains about it, imagine the effect on a regular human. It

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to fictitious address.