Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It’s amazing how willpower can build walls.”

— Yann Martel

52. “When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.”

— Yann Martel

53. “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.”

— Yann Martel

54. “It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.”

— Yann Martel

55. “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.”

— Yann Martel

56. “First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.”

— Yann Martel

57. “If there’s only one nation in the sky, shouldn’t all passports be valid for it?”

— Yann Martel

58. “I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.”

— Yann Martel

59. “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, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

— Yann Martel

60. “Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.”

— Yann Martel

61. “At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.”

— Yann Martel

62. “My suffering left me sad and gloomy.”

— Yann Martel

63. “I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.”

— Yann Martel

64. “My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions.”

— Yann Martel

65. “Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

— Yann Martel

66. “You can get used to anything – haven’t I already said that? Isn’t that what all survivors say?”

— Yann Martel

67. “Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.”

— Yann Martel

68. “Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!”

— Yann Martel

69. “It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.”

— Yann Martel

70. “Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.”

— Yann Martel

71. “Religion is more than rite and ritual.”

— Yann Martel

72. “For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.”

— Yann Martel

73. “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.”

— Yann Martel

74. “We think we live in a global village. We don’t. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.”

— Yann Martel

75. “People move in the hope of a better life.”

— Yann Martel

76. “Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.”

— Yann Martel

77. “All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. – “The Life of Pi.”

— Yann Martel

78. “It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”

— Yann Martel

79. “Evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.”

— Yann Martel

80. “Stories – individual stories, family stories, national stories – are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.”

— Yann Martel

81. “I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.”

— Yann Martel

82. “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.”

— Yann Martel

83. “India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.”

— Yann Martel

84. “Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them – and then they leap.”

— Yann Martel

85. “Books are something social – a writer speaking to a reader – so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.”

— Yann Martel

86. “The presence of God is the finest of rewards.”

— Yann Martel

87. “I’m not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don’t have a mobile. I just don’t need things. I don’t like things.”

— Yann Martel

88. “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.”

— Yann Martel

89. “Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they’re all we have.”

— Yann Martel

90. “I can well imagine an athiest’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” – and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.”

— Yann Martel

91. “I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.”

— Yann Martel

92. “Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.”

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

94. “Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?”

— Yann Martel

95. “I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.”

— Yann Martel

96. “If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.”

— Yann Martel

97. “Ageing is not easy, Senhora Castro. It’s a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology.”

— Yann Martel

98. “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.”

— Yann Martel

99. “I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.”

— Yann Martel

100. “Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.”

— Yann Martel