Life Of Pi Book Quotes

I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality. ~ Yann Martel

Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity. ~ Yann Martel

...I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. [...] It is important in life to conclude things properly. Only then you can let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse..."
~Life of Pi, chapter 94 ~ Yann Martel

Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited. ~ Yann Martel

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. ~ Yann Martel

If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe? ~ Yann Martel

I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. But what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye. ~ Yann Martel

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? ~ Yann Martel

What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell. I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example - I wonder - could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I'll tell you, that's one thing I have about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I'd had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I'd provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then - yes, I know, to a tiger, but still - I wish I had said, "Richard Parker, it's over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express I couldn't have done it without you. I would like to say it formally: Richard Parker, thank you. Thank you for saving my life. And now go where you must. You have known the confined freedom of a zoo most of your life; now you will know the free confinement of a jungle. I wish you all the best with it. Watch out for Man. He is not your friend. But I hope you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you , that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. What is that hiss? Ah, our boat has touched sand. So farewell, Richard Parker, farewell. God be wi ~ Yann Martel

Before 'Life of Pi,' I wanted to do economics. And now, I realize how bad a mistake that would have been. I just can't see it as my cup of tea anymore. ~ Suraj Sharma

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write. ~ Yann Martel

Everything looks beautiful in Life of Pi. ~ Lisa Schwarzbaum

How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true. ~ Yann Martel

There people fail to realise that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. - Pi Patel in Life of Pi
~ Yann Martel

Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry. ~ Yann Martel

If we look at our traditional tales, where the action before the final success always occurs three times: the last of the three times is always a little longer because it includes success: life is somehow the famous 0.142592653589793 after three....These stories are a kind of mythical Pi, that we finally 'mathematified', quantified by numbers. That's why the number Pi was and is so important. It explains the inexplicable, life, eternity, infinity, and at the same time the cycle of rebirth. ~ Marie D. F. Cachet

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is. ~ Yann Martel

The Life of Pi' timelessly encapsulates an objectively true & real meme that God is Love and seeks out those He calls unto himself."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods

I would like congratulate everyone who was a part of 'Life of Pi.' ~ Anupam Kher

Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious. ~ Yann Martel

Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. ~ Yann Martel

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God. ~ Yann Martel

Yes! Practice-singular!' the wise men screamed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point (Life of Pi 68). ~ Yann Martel

Gloom is but a shadow of a cloud passing by ~ Yann Martel

We believe what we see.' ... What do you do when you're in the dark? ~ Yann Martel

Once upon a time there was a banana and it grew. It grew until it was large, firm, yellow and fragrant. Then it fell to the ground and someone came upon it and ate it and afterwards that person felt better. ~ Martel, Yann

I don't know if I saw blood before turning into Mother's arms or if I daubed it on later, in my memory, with a brush (Life of Pi 36) ~ Yann Martel

But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian. ~ Yann Martel

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. ~ Yann Martel

Therefore, the eight trigrams are frequently coordinated with the day, and they can of course also be correlated with the course of the year ... A cycle of twelve hexagrams from the Book of Changes, the so-called P'i Kua is often also correlated witht he course of the year ... These eight trigrams, then are coordinated with the times of the day and the cardinal points, and have, in addition, very interesting psychological correlations. ~ Hellmut Wilhelm

Every decision we make has to be evaluated in light of our life-changing commitment to being a servant of Christ and His kingdom. ~ David Jeremiah

You look around at the people in your life, one by one, choosing to hold on to the ones who make you stronger and better, and letting go of the ones who don't. ~ Tamara Ireland Stone

Do not think of yourself as the body, but as the joyous consciousness and immortal life behind it. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I've been fascinated with all kinds of weapons my whole life, and as I have been able to afford to acquire pieces, here and there I started to collect. ~ Joe Perry

Why, thou monkey,' said a harpooneer to one of these lads, 'we 've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here.' Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious revery is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. 10
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shrie ~ Herman Melville

The head knows the goal; and the path is his tool. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Addiction is merely external behavior that is the "fruit" in a person's "tree" of life. If the fruit is cut off but the root left intact, the addict will be "changed" for the moment, but that seed will eventually regenerate the "plant" of addiction and produce similar fruit. Removing the fruit alone won't change the production cycle! This is one reason people often switch addictions. Recovery is about dealing with the seed and the roots. An addict will require an entirely new system change. In fact, all those "bad seeds" (lies) will need to be uprooted, and new seed sown in order to establish the production of God's fruit - fruit that leads to abundant life in Him. ~ Robert And Stephanie Tucker

One of the things that kills Buddhist spiritual life is excessive seriousness. ~ Gil Fronsdal

I am not a little bit of many things; but I am the sufficient representation of many things. I am not an incompletion of all these races; but I am a masterpiece of the prolific. I am an entirety, I am not a lack of anything; rather I am a whole of many things. God did not see it needful to make me generic. He thinks I am better than that. ~ C. JoyBell C.

In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction. ~ Anthony Hope

As his counterpart, the woman completes or fills out a man's life, making him a larger person than he could have been alone, bringing into his frame of reference a new feminine dimension from which to view life that he could have known in no other way. Then, too, he also brings to his wife a masculine perspective that enlarges her life, making her a fuller, more complete person than she could have been apart from him. This marriage union by covenant solves the problem of loneliness not merely by filling a gap, but by overfilling it. More than mere presence is involved. The loneliness of mere masculinity or femininity is likewise met. ~ Jay E. Adams

Laughter is the meaning of life. ~ Sammy Burchell

Being a parent is a life sentence. You see, that's why normal people should not have children. Because, if you raise a kid with only love and support, I guarantee that kid will be in rehab by the time he is sixteen. Why ? Because you never introduced him to mister back-of-your-hand. You know why I only broke into a liquor store once ? 'Cos my father introduced me to mister back-of-his-hand. And it's wiley side-kick. Mister foot-in-my-ass. ~ Christopher Titus

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself
the task of a lifetime
becomes the answer. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

As society is only possible if everyone, while living his own life, at the same time helps others to live; if every individual is simultaneously means and end; if each individual's well-being is simultaneously the condition necessary to the well-being of others, it is evident that the contrast between I and thou, means and end, automatically is overcome. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

October 1 Only goodness and faithful love will pursue me all the days of my life. Psalm 23:6 God told King Hezekiah he was going to die, but Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and cried out to God. In response, God added fifteen years to the king's life. But no sooner had he recovered than he started sounding as if his close encounter with death came with an automatic doctorate, as if the decision to spare one of God's own has anything to do with loving one person more than another. God cannot love us more or less than He does at this moment. He chooses to heal and not to heal for His own reasons. All His decisions come from His love. But whether He chooses to heal or take us home, His love remains constant. ~ Beth Moore

The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign - that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole - some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I'm just having fun. And giving a sort of second shot at childhood and life - and I need to be present to do it. ~ Sandra Bullock

Tolstoy wrote, 'The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.' He understood this service as a religious duty. For me, I understand it as a fact of life, as THE fact of life. What we do for each other is what survives. My sister is dead, but everything she did for me while she was alive is still going strong. I can still feel her hand reaching across the backseat of our car in Berlin, and I still hear her voice, our conversations going late into the night. ~ Nina Sankovitch

This is just the present chapter of my life. How can I give up when God isn't finished writing my story yet? ~ Deb Brammer

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased. ~ Pema Chodron

All prevailing philosophies embody the fiction that human life can be altered at will. Better aim for the impossible, they say, than submit to fate. Invariably, the result is a cult of human self-assertion that soon ends in farce. The line of thinking that is traced in this book runs in an opposite direction - not only in questioning the idea of progress but also, and more fundamentally, in rejecting the idea that it is only through action that life can be meaningful. Politics is only a small part of human existence, and the human animal only a very small part of the world. Science and technology have given us powers we never had before, but not the ability to refashion our existence as we wish. Poetry and religion are more realistic guides to life. ~ John N. Gray

I've been for 10 years trying to make something out of my life as an actor. I've learned a lot but I haven't done much that's worthwhile. So maybe if I make people wonder what I really do look like and make myself unrecognizable, they will be interested and intrigued, which eventually, of course, happened. ~ Christopher Lee

... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!...

"Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust. ~ Emile Zola

My name is Parker Black. I sometimes work as BlackDawn. My employer is Titan, and my training is from both the Marines and MIT." "I know." "But you don't know what that means. I will kill to protect you. I will hunt what follows you," he said through clenched teeth. "I will seek out anything that has its sights on you, and I will destroy it. I'm not a muscle hound with a hard-on for electronics. I'm a mercenary for the good guys, an analyst of life-and-death situations, and I will, I swear to Christ, maim, harm, and kill anything that wants what I care about. ~ Cristin Harber

All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung. ~ Megan Whalen Turner