Yann Martel Quotes

For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

You may perhaps think me less for running away from slavery, but as to myself, I have but one apology to make for it, which is this: I have only to regret that I did not start at an earlier period. I might have been free long before I was.

They [the slaves] have stabbed themselves for freedom—jumped into the waves for freedom—starved for freedom—fought like very tigers for freedom! But they have been hung, and burned, and shot—and their tyrants have been their historians!

Delivered from the galling yoke of time.

Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.

I get out, I get out of all your boxes.

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom to all.

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.

Death is a slave's freedom.

Don't I deserve to finally be free of you?

The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak.

Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip!

Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.

I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn’t come back

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down.

You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.

Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.

I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

it was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

Like a wild animal, the truth is too powerful to remain caged.

Who says I can't be free from all of the things that I used to be?