Pi Patel

"I came to love Richard Parker with an intensity of feeling that is even now not easy to put into words."

"It was as if the shipwreck, the loss of my family, the deaths around me had never happened."

"Time is the friend of the wonderful, the enemy of the ugly."

"Maturity: the period of life during which we stop arguing with ourselves and our elders."

"A mark of maturity is the ability to accept delay and disappointment."

"The world breaks those that it does not need."

"I have read many religious books. Hundreds. I make notes in the margins."

"What is the purpose of writing if it is not to save oneself?"

"I do not wish to add any more suffering to my story."

"You can recite facts. But facts are not the only thing that matter in life."

"I became a vegetarian not so much for the love of animals as for the love of myself."

"Hope is the thing that is hardest to kill, but it is also the thing that is easiest to abandon."

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition."

"I tell you the truth. What is better between the two stories? Which one is more true?"

"The mind is a wonderful instrument."

"A thing is only as big as it can be kept inside a person's head."

"Every creature will defend its home. It is the law of nature."

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

"I do not fear death so much as I fear the living."

"To live is to recognize, and perhaps to choose between, truths."

"I have nothing to say of my childhood. It was a small life, small in the ways that matter most."

"Atheism is a religion too. It requires faith—faith in the power of reason, faith in the ability of our minds to comprehend the world."

"Animals have an inner dignity and an awareness of their own worth that cannot be argued away."

"Without Richard Parker, I am nothing. He is my raison d'être."

"I came to love Richard Parker with a passion that was not entirely rational."

"The tiger knows no malice. He acts only from instinct and hunger—a purity that humans abandoned long ago."

"The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no?"

"Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith."

"I am a person who believes in form, in the architectures of things."

"We are all born like mammals. But our evolution doesn't stop there."