Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?”

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

253. “Strange in a familiar way, familiar in a strange way.”

— Yann Martel

254. “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

255. “When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, ‘Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?’ God never came. It wasn’t God who saved me – it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It’s the end. If the watch doesn’t work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us.”

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

258. “This tiny habitation on wheels, with bit parts of the living room, the washroom, and the fireplace, is a pathetic admission that human life is no more than this: an attempt to feel at home while racing towards oblivion. He.”

— Yann Martel

259. “The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being.”

— Yann Martel

260. “I kept one eye on the horizon, one eye on the other end of the lifeboat.”

— Yann Martel

261. “As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.”

— Yann Martel

262. “Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

— Yann Martel

263. “Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.”

— Yann Martel

264. “Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.”

— Yann Martel

265. “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

266. “If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.”

— Yann Martel

267. “It’s not right that gentleness meet horror.”

— Yann Martel

268. “A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger.”

— Yann Martel

269. “The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.”

— Yann Martel

270. “Animals that escape go from the known into the unknown – and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown. Escaping animals usually hind in the very first place they find that gives them a sense of security, and they are dangerous only to those who happen to get between them and their reckoned safe spot.”

— Yann Martel

271. “To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you.”

— Yann Martel

272. “So I drifted. Winds and currents decided where I went. Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals – I travelled down the road of life – and I did other things with my fingers than try to measure latitude.”

— Yann Martel

273. “Isn’t it ironic, Richard Parker? We’re in hell yet still we’re afraid of immortality.”

— Yann Martel

274. “Moving a zoo is like moving a city.”

— Yann Martel

275. “I’ll tell you, that’s one thing I hate about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.”

— Yann Martel

276. “There are many ways in which life’s little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all.”

— Yann Martel

277. “We are all born like Catholics, aren’t we – in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God? After that meeting the matter ends for most of us. If there is a change, it is usually for the lesser rather than the greater; many people seem to lose God along life’s way.”

— Yann Martel

278. “It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like.”

— Yann Martel

279. “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

280. “My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all.”

— Yann Martel

281. “A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction – besides unexpected interludes – has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.”

— Yann Martel

282. “What you don’t realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals – domestication it’s called – but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will.”

— Yann Martel

283. “Swimming instruction, which in time became swimming practice, was gruelling, but there was the deep pleasure of doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over, till hypnosis practically, the water turning from molten lead to liquid light.”

— Yann Martel

284. “Look: Christ on the Cross died of suffocation, but His only complaint was of thirst. If thirst can be so taxing that even God Incarnate complains about it, imagine the effect on a regular human. It.”

— Yann Martel

285. “My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific Ocean and I hope that my telling of his tale does not disappoint him.”

— Yann Martel

286. “Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?” “We’re just being reasonable.” “So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”

— Yann Martel

287. “To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing – I’m sorry, I would rather not go on.”

— Yann Martel

288. “High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering, I should turn to God.”

— Yann Martel

289. “I must say a word about fear. It’s is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. it begins in your mind, always.”

— Yann Martel

290. “Do you see the invisible spirals on the margins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out.”

— Yann Martel

291. “I couldn’t bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, “Can I ’ave your name?” I said, “I am who I am.” Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for “Ian Hoolihan”.”

— Yann Martel

292. “There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless.”

— Yann Martel

293. “I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic.”

— Yann Martel

294. “Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously.”

— Yann Martel

295. “We left Madras on June 21st, 1977, on the Panamanian-registered Japanese cargo ship Tsimtsum.”

— Yann Martel

296. “It’s a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never.”

— Yann Martel

297. “Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness.”

— Yann Martel

298. “Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It’s the end.”

— Yann Martel

299. “To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity. I stopped attending Mass at Our Lady of Immaculate Conception and went instead to Our Lady of Angels. I no longer lingered after Friday prayer among my brethren. I went to temple at crowded times when the Brahmins were too distracted to come between God and me.”

— Yann Martel

300. “I don’t believe in religion. Religion is darkness.”

— Yann Martel