Yann Martel Quotes

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.

We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. "Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

I'll never harden my heart but I've toughened the muscles around it.

I learnt early to have little expectation so I protected myself from ever feeling greatly disappointed.

Anybody who wears their feelings on their sleeve and has a harder, crusty shell - like I do - is definitely protecting an inner sensitivity.

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.

As a kid, I would push my shoulders forward in order to hide my heart from being hurt.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

I have created a shell around me, in the good and the bad moments.

I invented 'Christine' as a survival technique to deal with many things. I felt it would save me.

As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?

And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain - the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head - but it was manageable. I could live through it. I didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.

If I'd kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?

The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.