Life of Pi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

"The only effective defense is a well-exercised imagination."

"I pray daily to various deities as well. It suits me."

"There is something to be said for having a story to be believed and believed in by those who listen."

"I learned the language of the animals: a vast vocabulary of snarls and chirps and grunts."

"The sea is nothing but a succession of gazes."

"Habit is the guide to all mankind."

"A person can get used to eating almost anything."

"Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an enemy's talon or tooth."

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent."

"The world breaks everyone. Some become strong in the broken places."

"I survived and arrived."

"Can you imagine what it would be like to live at sea, as I did, and come to know it as a friend?"

"Every interpretation of an event is a version of the event."

"I do not wish to add any details or make this story any more complicated than it already is."

"My life is like a memento mori painting from the Renaissance: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of my desires."