Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Yann Martel

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— 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. “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

263. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

266. “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

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

— Yann Martel

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Yann Martel

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Yann Martel

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Be daunted, but not defeated.”

— Yann Martel

284. “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

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

— Yann Martel

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It.”

— Yann Martel

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Yann Martel

294. “So I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939. I.”

— Yann Martel

295. “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

296. “Buku yang bisa ku baca berulang-ulang, dengan sudut pandang baru dan pengertian baru setiap kalinya.”

— Yann Martel

297. “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

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

— Yann Martel

299. “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

300. “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