Yann Martel Love Quotes and Sayings
Yann Martel Love Quotes and Sayings
#1-2 Life Of Pi
1. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
2. 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. That pain is like an axe that chops at my heart.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Yann Martel (born June 25, 1963) is a Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.
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Sayings by Yann Martel
#1-4 Life of Pi
1. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
2. I must say a word about fear. It 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…So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
3. It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
4. Things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to, but what can you do? You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
#5-8 Life Of Pi, Illustrated, Canongate Books, 19 July 2012
5. 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.
6. 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 is like losing—I’m sorry, I would rather not go on.
7. The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?
8. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.
#9-12 Life of Pi, Canongate Books, 9 May 2002
9. Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
10. I was giving up. I would have given up—if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said, “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.”
11. I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and to do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.
12. I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently.
#13-14 Life of Pi, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 4 June 2002
13. What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell. I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example—I wonder—could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less?
14. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
#15 Life of Pi, Canongate Books, 9 May 2002
15. 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 the hope of a better life.
#16 Life of Pi, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 4 June 2002
16. …Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed, hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God are hat wearing Muslims.