Melissa

“If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― 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

“I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek.”
― 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