Melissa

“I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love—but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Imaginative intelligence, the power to put ourselves sympathetically in another person's place, is one of the highest forms of intelligence and one of the rarest. Its importance is seldom understood. It is often equated in the popular mind with "romantic" or silly fantasies, feminine oversensitivity, silly vaporizing, ego-indulgence, or escapism, and is thought to have only an enfeebling connection, if any, with practical living. Nothing could be further from the truth. We can be taught to argue, to debate, to analyze, to calculate, to learn the processes of engineering, the pathology of disease, to understand the laws of nature or the laws of the land but who can teach us how to understand and to respect another person's feelings (pg. 147).”
― Edith Newman Devlin, Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood