Quotes from Yann Martel

As far as he can tell, that's what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by the river, watching the water go by. It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.

I wish I could convey the perfection... But language founders in such seas

Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change. I

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

I had in my life looked at a number of beautiful starry nights, where with just two colours and the simplest of styles nature draws the grandest of pictures, and I felt the feelings of wonder and smallness that we all feel, and I got a clear sense of direction from the spectacle, most definitely, but I mean that in a spiritual sense, not in a geographic one.

For evil from within is but evil from within that has been let out

There are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing anything but our sense experience. A clear intellect, close attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as superstitious bosh. God does not exist.

todo contiene rastros de lo divino.

La primera sensación de maravilla es la que cala más hondo...

Por qué iba a someterse Dios a algo así? ¿Por qué no dejar la muerte para los mortales? ¿Por qué tuvo que ensuciar lo que era bello, estropear la perfección? -Por amor...

One such time I left town and on my way back, at a point where the land was high and I could see the sea to my left and down the road a long ways, I suddenly felt I was in heaven. The spot was in fact no different from when I had passed it not long before, but my way of seeing it had changed.

Doubt is useful for awhile. We must all pass through the garden of Gesthemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. 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. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

I am not an autobiographical writer.

I felt I was beating a rainbow to death

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?