Yann Martel Quotes

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.

A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.

Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells

...he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch.

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.