Yann Martel Quotes

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.

The mark of fear is not easily removed.

As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

Everybody's darkness is different. My darkness came from my mom having pancreatitis and almost dyin'. And what I noticed was that the darkness ain't goin' nowhere.

That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

I was badly bullied when I was in the seventh grade - relentlessly, mercilessly - by a group of 12-year-old girls. And it left me with a determination that no matter what, I had to throw my shoulders back, stick out my chin, and project a sense that no one and nothing could hurt me. That turned out to be a life-changing mistake.

If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.

I spent four days and four nights just covered in blood, falling in the water.

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

I often close my eyes because I can't tolerate violence.

Grief causes suffering and disease.

I probably only cried five or six times in my life and I think four of those times was from my daddy kicking my butt.

My parents' divorce left me with a lot of sadness and pain and acting, and especially humour, was my way of dealing with all that.

When you suffer a tragedy, the secondary loss of having it bleed into other areas of your life is so real.

I was depressed for a year after 'The Pianist,' and I don't suffer from that, generally. It wasn't just a depression; it was a mourning.

There's many, many people who have been through a lot worse things than I went through. I lost my dad when I was 14 and to violence.

It makes you tougher. And when you lose a child, no one can say anything that is ever going to impact you.

We're all painfully aware of how suddenly violence can occur, how crippling it is, and how survivors have to find a way back from that.

So many people have been abused. It's not rare; it's a very common human experience, and we survive.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.