Yann Martel Quotes

There will be days when you feel defeated, exhausted, and plain old beat-up by life's whiplash. People you love will disappoint you - and you will disappoint them. You'll probably struggle with some kind of mortal appetite. Some days it will feel as though the veil between Heaven and Earth is made of reinforced concrete.

Some people who suffer run away from God, and I know the tendency, but instead I just run to Him.

Where the mind is past hope, the heart is past shame.

Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down - to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who's never gone through difficulty.

When our TV screens are filled with heartbreaking images of suffering, we have to dig deep inside ourselves in order to keep going.

In our culture, I feel like everyone just wants the good life, the dream life, but I'm learning to embrace suffering because with suffering there's so much good that comes out of it.

Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.

It is tough: sometimes the pain that you feel makes you grow.

I think our greatest moments of pain can be our greatest chance to grow in our faith and to share it and hopefully bring someone else back from the brink.

Throw dirt on me, and grow a wild flower

I'm by no means a perfect human being. I experience more than half of my life perpetuating darkness. That was because I was dropped in a place of darkness and expected to find a way out.

As the most generous vine, if it is not pruned, runs out into many superfluous stems, and grows at last weak and fruitless; so dote the best man, if he be not cut short of his desires and pruned with afflictions. If it be painful to bleed, it is worse to wither. Let me be pruned, that I may grow, rather than be cut up to burn.

Pain is a byproduct of life. That’s the truth. Life sometimes sucks. That’s true for everyone. But if you don’t face the pain and the suck, you don’t ever get the other things either. Laughter. Joy. Love. Pain passes, but those things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

This iron world bungs down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate.

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.

You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

Beauty that arose out of pain.

The tears of affliction are often needed to keep the eye of faith bright.

Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.

I am certain that I never did grow in grace one-half so much anywhere as I have upon the bed of pain.

I have been schooled by my own suffering: I've learned the many ways of being purged.

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.

The scars will take me far, they always do.

Every Warrior of the Light has suffered for the most trivial of reasons.