Sheila’s Reviews > Life of Pi > Status Update

When my English teacher gave me this book in 12th grade, I'd expected to read 2 paragraphs of an Indian boy catching tiger feces in a cup and trying to eat it.

"Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness — how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view I have a things? This peephole is all I've got!"

"if you want to see wildlife it is on foot, and quietly, that you must explore a forest. It is the same with the sea. You must stoll though the Pacific at a walking pace, so to speak, to see the wealth and abundance that it holds."

Also the paragraph that describes the ocean as if it is a city in rush hour is so beautiful.

"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."

"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?"

"And what of my extended family—birds, beasts, and reptiles? They too have drowned. Every single thing I value in life has been destroyed. And I am allowed no explanation? I am to suffer hell without any account from heaven? In that case, what is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities—the getting of food, clothing, and shelter?"

“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.”

"To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity."

"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 a small clearing of each heart."

Hilarious banter among a priest, a pandit, and a imam.