Yann Martel

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

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...

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story.

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.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?

In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.