Quotes from Yann Martel

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

I have a story that will make you believe in God.

We believe what we see. So did Columbus. What do you do when you're in the dark?

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaler as I grew older, train included. Now it's so small it fits in my head.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

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?

Religion? Mr Kumar grinned broadly. I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Don't you bully me with your politeness!

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.

Things didn't turn out the way they used to, but what can you do? You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

I knelt a mortal; I rose an immortal.

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

The world isn't just the way it is. It's how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

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.

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.

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. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day.

We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion.

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.

We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It is not the question of courage. It is something constitutional, an ability to let go. It maybe nothing more than life-hungry stupidity.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.