Quotes from Yann Martel

Cinta sulit dipercaya, tanyakan pada siapapun yang sedang jatuh cinta. Kehidupan ini juga sulit dipercaya, tanyakan pada ilmuwan manapun. Tuhan juga sulit dipercaya, tanyakan pada siapapun yang memercayainya. Kenapa Anda tidak menerima hal-hal yang sulit dipercaya?

To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.

Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof.

Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. 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.

Loneliness comes up to him like a sniffing dog. It circles him insistently. He waves it away, but it refuses to leave him alone.

Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.

Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.

I must go the washroom. I've shaken a lot of hands.

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of another faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap.

I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.

Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.

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

There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements...where an animal takes a human being or another animal to be one of it's kind.

Time is an illusion that only makes us pant.

It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspicious of swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountain climbers.

If you become sick yourself, don't waste your vomit by sending it overboard. Vomit makes an excellent border guard. Puke on the edges of your territory.

I was determined to move forward.

Kau mungkin tidak percaya pada kehidupan, tapi aku tidak percaya pada kematian.

The reason death sticks do closely to life isn't biological necessity-its envy. 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 an thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be.

A germ of religious exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed.

Strach to jedyny prawdziwy przeciwnik ?ycia.

Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others.

An epic simplicity