Quotes from Yann Martel

The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

Why can't I be a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim?

But immobilizing darts don't bring on sleep gently, like a good cup of tea; they knock out like a bottle of hard liquor straight up.

a wandering corpse, a bundle of mindless functions

This book was born as I was hungry. Let m eexplain.

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

Hay una gran recompensa para el ojo que observa y el oído que escucha.

Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats. I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations.

Una casa no es más que un territorio en el que nuestras necesidades básicas se satisfacen de cerca y sin peligro.

Somos una nación de ingenieros que aspiran a ser reconocidos.

These people walk by a window deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, Business as usual But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story.

This, in a nutshell, is Hinduism, and I have been a Hindu all my life. With its notions in mind I see my place in the universe. But we should not cling!

The cruelty of children comes as news to no one.

His father had been his sole supporter, telling him to live for his love for Dora, in precise opposition to his uncle's silent opprobrium. Dora was relegated to invisible duties deep within the kitchen. Gaspar lived equally invisibly in the Lobo household, invisibly loved by his father, who invisibly loved his mother.

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.

Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He's learned to unshackle himself of the race of time and contemplate time itself. [..] It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.

Por qué tolerar la oscuridad? Todo ya está aquí y está claro si sabemos mirar con la atención debida.

La obsesión de colocarnos en el centro de todo es la ruina tanto de los teólogos como de los zoólogos.

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

??a con là m?t tr?i nh? chi?u lên cái bóng c?a cha m? nó, và khi m?t tr?i Ä'ó l?n Ä'i, thì cha m? ch? còn bóng t?i.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity – it's 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 a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccuping,his face drenched with tears.We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more--there is no greater relationship. [..] We are risen does, not fallen angels. Tomás is strangled by loneliness.

One discovers weeping - one's weeping personality - only upon weeping. It is a strange discovery, not only to others but to oneself. p 49

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.