These people walk by a widow 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. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

— Yann Martel

Yann Martel Quotes

They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love.

— Yann Martel

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

— Yann Martel

Moving a zoo is like moving a city.

— Yann Martel

We left Madras on June 21st, 1977, on the Panamanian-registered Japanese cargo ship Tsimtsum.

— Yann Martel

To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you.

— Yann Martel

What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn’t orchestrate.

— Yann Martel

The guttural eruptions and long flowing vowels rolled just beneath my comprehension like a beautiful brook. I gazed into this brook for long spells of time. It was not wide, just one man’s voice, but it was as deep as the universe.

— Yann Martel

On a day when I estimated it was my mothers birthday, I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her out loud.

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

The stars shone with such fears, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

— Yann Martel

I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.

— Yann Martel

That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality?

— Yann Martel

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.

— Yann Martel

These people walk by a widow 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. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won’t wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why would an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative?

— Yann Martel

When Mr. Kumar visited the zoo, it was to take the pulse of the universe, and his stethoscopic mind always confirmed to him that everything was in order, that everything was order.

— Yann Martel

She heard “Hairless Christians”, and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that 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.

— Yann Martel

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

— Yann Martel

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language.

— Yann Martel
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