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. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
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.
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
Isn’t it ironic, Richard Parker? We’re in hell yet still we’re afraid of immortality.
We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It is not the question of courage. It is something constitutional, an ability to let go. It maybe nothing more than life-hungry stupidity.
I’ll tell you, that’s one thing I hate 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.
I blinked deliberately, expecting my eyelids to act like lumberjacks. But the trees would not fall.
I must go the washroom. I’ve shaken a lot of hands.
I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic.
The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. Warehouses full of light and dust. Empty attics with a view. Coastlines. Prairies.
We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony.
It’s a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never.
Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change .
There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless.
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. – “The Life of Pi.
He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas.
Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life.
Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?
I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent.