Quotes from Yann Martel

Love is a house with many rooms, this room to feed the love, this one to entertain it, this one to clean it, this one to dress it, this one to allow it to rest, and each of these rooms can also just as well also be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for telling one's secrets or the room for sulking or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness...

Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It

Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.

I became aware of a voice inside my head. [...] It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer...then surely we are also permitted doubt.

So you see, if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry- be assured, zoo animals are amply fed- or because it's blood thirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.

One discovers weeping—one's weeping personality—only upon weeping. It is a strange discovery, not only to others but to oneself

La repetición es un factor esencial, no sólo para adiestrar a los animales, sino también a los humanos.

I was as surprised as a flower that sees for the first time a bee coming towards it

Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times — that is, hard — had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.

The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy.

What a strange, wondrous thing, music. At last the chattering mind is silenced. No past to regret, to future to worry about, no more frantic knitting of words and thoughts. Only a beautiful, soaring nonsense.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language.

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently.

Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

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, its 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.

All of life is an act of letting go but what hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.

When the final moment came, signalled to him by the dramatic stoppage of her loud, rasping breathing (whereas their son had departed so quietly, like the petals of a flower falling off), he felt like a sheet of ice being rushed along a river.

The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord's hand holding me up.

As soon as I got close to starting anything, I was beset by questions and hesitations. What I was about to do was so important, so significant, that it always required further consideration. My spontaneity would fizzle. I would put off my oeuvre for another day. Tomorrow at eight thirty I would start, for sure. Meanwhile, in joyful anticipation of this, I would go for a walk and then read.

There are two ways that you can learn about the world. You can travel or you can read.

It's the sun that makes a landscape, drawing out its color, defining its contours, giving it its spirit.

He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age.

Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously. He stared at the crucifix, balancing between utter belief and utter disbelief.