Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 9

201. “We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.”

— Yann Martel

202. “Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.”

— Yann Martel

203. “It’s not atheists who get stuck in my caw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as means of transportation.”

— Yann Martel

204. “The grand march of progress apparently includes the unfortunate necessity of chopping down every obstacle in its way.”

— Yann Martel

205. “I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me.”

— Yann Martel

206. “To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.”

— Yann Martel

207. “I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.”

— Yann Martel

208. “I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer.”

— Yann Martel

209. “A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.”

— Yann Martel

210. “I must go the washroom. I’ve shaken a lot of hands.”

— Yann Martel

211. “A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.”

— Yann Martel

212. “What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?”

— Yann Martel

213. “There’s nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.”

— Yann Martel

214. “I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it’s sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It’s a very laborious process, but I love doing it.”

— Yann Martel

215. “Another favorite position of his was sitting with his back to me, his rear half resting on the floor of the boat and his front half on the bench, his face buried into the stern, paws right next to his head, looking as if we were playing hide-and-seek and he were the one counting. In this position he tended to lie very still, with only the occasional twitching of his ears to indicate that he is not necessarily sleeping.”

— Yann Martel

216. “A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.”

— Yann Martel

217. “In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.”

— Yann Martel

218. “The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. Warehouses full of light and dust. Empty attics with a view. Coastlines. Prairies.”

— Yann Martel

219. “I went to temple at crowded times when Brahmins were too distracted to come between me and God.”

— Yann Martel

220. “My next book – each one while I’m working on it – dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn’t, why would I write it?”

— Yann Martel

221. “Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core. My hands naturally come together in reverent worship.”

— Yann Martel

222. “While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He’s learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that’s what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It’s a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.”

— Yann Martel

223. “Without a driver this bus is lost.”

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

225. “Loneliness comes up to him like a sniffing dog. It circles him insistently. He waves it away, but it refuses to leave him alone.”

— Yann Martel

226. “Under the pathologist’s microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist’s job is to find the bull among the matador cells.”

— Yann Martel

227. “War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.”

— Yann Martel

228. “Right away, death is word-eating.”

— Yann Martel

229. “My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.”

— Yann Martel

230. “I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say “Oh, I don’t read much fiction,” as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn’t an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.”

— Yann Martel

231. “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 be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness, and, of course, there are the rooms for the new members of the household.”

— Yann Martel

232. “Everything in me, right down to the pores of my skin, was expressing joy.”

— Yann Martel

233. “Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.”

— Yann Martel

234. “Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation.”

— Yann Martel

235. “Of the river of time, he worries neither about its spring nor its delta.”

— Yann Martel

236. “Most of us get our history through story.”

— Yann Martel

237. “Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don’t like.”

— Yann Martel

238. “Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.”

— Yann Martel

239. “The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.”

— Yann Martel

240. “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. A story calls upon us... as individuals-and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind.”

— Yann Martel

241. “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.”

— Yann Martel

242. “We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony.”

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

244. “That’s the nature of grief: It’s a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support.”

— Yann Martel

245. “Life goes on and you don’t touch tigers.”

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

247. “In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was from the streets. Which is to stay, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish.”

— Yann Martel

248. “Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It’s a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It’s a most desirable disease. One wouldn’t want to do without it. It’s like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end.”

— Yann Martel

249. “But religion is more than rite and ritual. There is what the rite and ritual stand for.”

— Yann Martel

250. “His heart is expended that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love.”

— Yann Martel