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

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.