Yann Martel Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

  Yann Martel

  Struggle, Expression, Water

  Yann Martel, Canongate Books (2007). “Life of Pi (Illustrated): Deluxe Illustrated Edition”, p.62, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

  Yann Martel

  Love, Blessing, Qualms About

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.23, Canongate Books

• I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.

  Yann Martel

  Sea, Water, Perfection

  Yann Martel (2012). “Life Of Pi, Illustrated”, p.30, Canongate Books

• What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.

  Yann Martel

  Book, Littles, Way

  Source: www.avclub.com

• The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

  Yann Martel

  Book, Different, Cinema

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. November 6, 2007.

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