Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” Quotes (77 Quotes)

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

I felt like I was beating a rainbow to death.

Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you.

Religion is more than rite and ritual.

To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

I have a story that will make you believe in God.

Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we-in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?

But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in his mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? -- Love. That was his answer.

I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.

Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.

Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in the trade.

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

Strach to jedyny prawdziwy przeciwnik z.ycia.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgment that comes down heavily.

I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

Christianity is a religion in a rush.

I went to temple at crowded times when Brahmins were too distracted to come between me and God.

Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.

The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.

Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?

Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another.

If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?

My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions.

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.

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? ... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.

First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.

The main battlefield of good is not the open ground of the publis arena, but the small clearing of each heart.

You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?

For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without seeing a soul.

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

My greatest wish -- other than salvation -- was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.

The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.