Life of Pi by Yann Martel

• That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reading? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
• If we, citizens, do no support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
• When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
• It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
• Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
• It was my luck to have a few good teachers in my youth, men and women who came into my dark head and lit a match.
• Religion will save us.
• I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
• Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
• All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
• We are all born like Catholics, aren't we--in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God? After that meeting the matter ends for most of us. If there is a change, it is usually for the lesser rather than the greater; many people seem to lose God along life's way.
• 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.
• If you take two steps towards God, God runs to you!
• The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
• These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.
• Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread--these are two laws of nature. If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood!
• Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult? The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.
• People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. Because of the impression that the future is blocked up, that they might do all right but not their children. Because of the feeling that nothing will change, that happiness and prosperity are possible only somewhere else.
• No greatness without goodness.
• How blinded we are by money.
• Things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to, but what can you do? You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
• 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?
• When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
• Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing. The sight brings on an oppressive sadness that no car about to hit you or water about to drown you can match.
• I discovered that at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. It's not something evident, in my experience. Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others--and I am one of those--never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. It may be nothing more than life-hungry stupidity.
• I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear. Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you. The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
• There's nothing like extreme need to give you resolve.
• Was there any reward greater in life? Any punishment worse than death?
• Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses.
• Be daunted, but not defeated. Remember: the spirit, above all else, counts. If you have the will to live, you will.
• I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me.
• Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate.
• 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.
• Time is an illusion that only makes us pant.
• Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love--but sometimes it was so hard to love.
• The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
• The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
• What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.
• Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
• 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.
• 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?
• Be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
• The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

2/11/2010--2:15 AM