Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I ask you, is it the fig tree’s fault that it’s not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?”

— Yann Martel

152. “Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.”

— Yann Martel

153. “I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl’s kiss on your cheek.”

— Yann Martel

154. “I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.”

— Yann Martel

155. “In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.”

— Yann Martel

156. “Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.”

— Yann Martel

157. “You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!”

— Yann Martel

158. “What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.”

— Yann Martel

159. “The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.”

— Yann Martel

160. “I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.”

— Yann Martel

161. “Things didn’t turn out the way they were suppsed to, but qhat can you do? You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”

— Yann Martel

162. “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?′ Mr. Okamoto: ‘That’s an interesting question?’ Mr. Chiba: ‘The story with animals.’ Mr. Okamoto: ‘Yes. The story with animals is the better story.’ Pi Patel: ‘Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

— Yann Martel

163. “The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.”

— Yann Martel

164. “Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.”

— Yann Martel

165. “The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.”

— Yann Martel

166. “And I survived because I made a point of forgetting.”

— Yann Martel

167. “No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.”

— Yann Martel

168. “Christianity is a religion in a rush.”

— Yann Martel

169. “Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life.”

— Yann Martel

170. “How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally – certainly with my secular background – the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.”

— Yann Martel

171. “The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.”

— Yann Martel

172. “For example – I wonder – could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I’ll tell you, that’s one thing I hate about my nickname, the way that number runs on forever. It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.”

— Yann Martel

173. “If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.”

— Yann Martel

174. “I blinked deliberately, expecting my eyelids to act like lumberjacks. But the trees would not fall.”

— Yann Martel

175. “This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right – loving and brave – but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing. It wasn’t for fear of angering Mr. Kumar. I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved. 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.”

— Yann Martel

176. “I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent.”

— Yann Martel

177. “I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.”

— Yann Martel

178. “I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.”

— Yann Martel

179. “There are animals we haven’t stopped by. Don’t think they’re harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.”

— Yann Martel

180. “Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof.”

— Yann Martel

181. “I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while.”

— Yann Martel

182. “Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.”

— Yann Martel

183. “The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.”

— Yann Martel

184. “Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.”

— Yann Martel

185. “Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.”

— Yann Martel

186. “Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion – and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.”

— Yann Martel

187. “How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.”

— Yann Martel

188. “Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that’s why we should change it. I didn’t say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.”

— Yann Martel

189. “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.”

— Yann Martel

190. “The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.”

— Yann Martel

191. “Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.”

— Yann Martel

192. “It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaler as I grew older, train included. Now it’s so small it fits in my head.”

— Yann Martel

193. “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.”

— Yann Martel

194. “In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.”

— Yann Martel

195. “My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.”

— Yann Martel

196. “I would nearly go into convulsions of dismay at my stupidity.”

— Yann Martel

197. “If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without seeing a soul.”

— Yann Martel

198. “But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in his mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? – Love. That was his answer.”

— Yann Martel

199. “Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?”

— Yann Martel

200. “Time is an illusion that makes us all pant.”

— Yann Martel