Yann Martel Quotes

There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Or sleep and wait for death to get closer. Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.

I love bleak things.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

My sweetest hope is to lose hope.

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

It seems as if life and hope must cease together.

I like dark, hopeless, beautiful tragedies.

I had always thought of myself as a sanguine person, quite light and airy. But for a long while, no one could have possibly made me laugh or smile. It was awful.

Life and hope must cease together.

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

A world without hope, but no despair

She understood his eyes, colder than winter's heart. A man who knew he was dead and couldn't make himself care; you are spared that. Mashiara. His lost love.

How bitterly glad I am to see you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won't be for long. What do you know about the sea? Nothing. What do I know about the sea? Nothing. Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion-- It should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view. Oh enough of this disembling. Let me say plainly: I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Not the spiders, please.

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

O wretched state! o bosom black as death!

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary. My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, And the days are dark and dreary. Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

Despair snuffs the sun from the firmament.

Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope