Top 400 Yann Martel Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I’ve never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.”

— Yann Martel

352. “To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.”

— Yann Martel

353. “Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they’ve known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult? The answer is the same the world over: people move in hope of a better life.”

— Yann Martel

354. “The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness.”

— Yann Martel

355. “How could the stars, sparkle as they might, help me find my way if they kept moving?”

— Yann Martel

356. “It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness.”

— Yann Martel

357. “You can keep your sweaty, chatty Son to yourself.”

— Yann Martel

358. “To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.”

— Yann Martel

359. “I can well imagine that somewhere far off, 150 miles away, a ship’s watch looked up, startled, and later reported the oddest thing, that he thought he heard a cat’s meow coming from three o’clock. Days.”

— Yann Martel

360. “It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.”

— Yann Martel

361. “Until it knows its rank for certain, the animal lives a life of unbearable anarchy.”

— Yann Martel

362. “Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting – that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art – and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives.”

— Yann Martel

363. “He was a man whose profession it was to love, and he would offer comfort and guidance to the best of his ability. I.”

— Yann Martel

364. “It’s a big ocean crossed by busy ships. I went slowly, observing much.”

— Yann Martel

365. “Agama bukan sekadar ritual dan tata cara. Ada makna di balik ritual dan tata cara itu.”

— Yann Martel

366. “I look at it and I say, “You’ve got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!”

— Yann Martel

367. “I began to wait. My thoughts swung wildly. I was either fixed on practical details of immediate survival or transfixed by pain, weeping silently, my mouth open and my hands on my head.”

— Yann Martel

368. “What are we without the ones we love?”

— Yann Martel

369. “On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, ‘Gosh, life is racing by.’ But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.”

— Yann Martel

370. “They would emerge a short distance away, sometimes three or four of them, a short lived archipelago of volcanic islands.”

— Yann Martel

371. “Without your sheep, you would have no livelihood, you would die. This dependency creates a sort of equality, doesn’t it? Not individually, but collectively. As a group, you and your sheep are at opposite sides of a seesaw, and somewhere in between there is a fulcrum. You must maintain the balance. In that sense, we are no better than they.”

— Yann Martel

372. “He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age.”

— Yann Martel

373. “What a strange, wondrous thing, music. At last the chattering mind is silenced. No past to regret, to future to worry about, no more frantic knitting of words and thoughts. Only a beautiful, soaring nonsense.”

— Yann Martel

374. “If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, “Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go!” – do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn’t. Birds are not free. The people you’ve.”

— Yann Martel

375. “They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love.”

— Yann Martel

376. “We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. When he was gone, the sea had only itself to contemplate.”

— Yann Martel

377. “I looked up. I couldn’t see him. He was hiding at the bottom of the boat. He appeared when he threw my mother’s body overboard. His mouth was red. The water boiled with fish.”

— Yann Martel

378. “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 also be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for telling one’s secrets or the room for sulking or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness...”

— Yann Martel

379. “Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously. He stared at the crucifix, balancing between utter belief and utter disbelief.”

— Yann Martel

380. “At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine – and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When.”

— Yann Martel

381. “With questions that are orders.”

— Yann Martel

382. “The multitude of the curious and the offended descends upon him.”

— Yann Martel

383. “Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It.”

— Yann Martel

384. “Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. And that is what he is doing: becoming someone.”

— Yann Martel

385. “Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low.”

— Yann Martel

386. “If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt.”

— Yann Martel

387. “Animals are also poisoned. And there are indecencies.”

— Yann Martel

388. “Then normal sank.”

— Yann Martel

389. “The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord’s hand holding me up.”

— Yann Martel

390. “And she prays with her eyes closed. It’s just a crucifix. And if he’s an ape, so be it-he’s an ape. He’s still the Son of God.”

— Yann Martel

391. “HIs life was always a happenstance.”

— Yann Martel

392. “The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy.”

— Yann Martel

393. “He became a champion napper.”

— Yann Martel

394. “In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season.”

— Yann Martel

395. “As soon as I got close to starting anything, I was beset by questions and hesitations. What I was about to do was so important, so significant, that it always required further consideration. My spontaneity would fizzle. I would put off my oeuvre for another day. Tomorrow at eight thirty I would start, for sure. Meanwhile, in joyful anticipation of this, I would go for a walk and then read.”

— Yann Martel

396. “Do you understand? You’ve been praying to a crucified chimpanzee all these years. Your Son of Man is not a god-he’s just an ape on a cross!”

— Yann Martel

397. “Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?”

— Yann Martel

398. “Houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out.”

— Yann Martel

399. “They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It’s built to accommodate the largest frames, there’s that. And they’re naked. But it’s something else. That parcel of the being called the soul-weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall-takes up a surprising amount of space, like aloud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink.”

— Yann Martel

400. “As far as he can tell, that’s what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by the river, watching the water go by. It’s a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.”

— Yann Martel