When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival. — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
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. — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“It’s a big ocean crossed by busy ships. I went slowly, observing much.” — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“The word isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it,… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“Remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.” — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“I must say a word about fear. It's is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary,… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves,… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.” — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread - these are two laws… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence were… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
“For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of… — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
