Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.”

— Yann Martel

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

206. “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

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

— Yann Martel

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

218. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

223. “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

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

— Yann Martel

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Yann Martel

243. “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

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

— Yann Martel

245. “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

246. “Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?”

— Yann Martel

247. “We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more – there is no greater relationship.”

— Yann Martel

248. “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. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn’t become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.”

— Yann Martel

249. “Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone.”

— Yann Martel

250. “The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.”

— Yann Martel