Life of Pi: Chapters 37–53

As for the sea, it looked rough, but to a landlubber the sea is always impressive and forbidding, beautiful and dangerous.

I looked about for my family, for survivors, for another lifeboat, for anything that might bring me hope. There was nothing. Only rain, marauding waves of black ocean and the flotsam of tragedy.

Her gestures were slow and tentative and her eyes reflected deep mental confusion.

I felt pity and then I moved on. This is not something I am proud of. I am sorry I was so callous about the matter.

It is a particularly funny thing to read human traits in animals, especially in apes and monkeys, where it is so easy. Simians are the clearest mirrors we have in the animal world.

If goats could be brought to live amicably with rhinoceros, why not orang-utans with hyenas?

It started pulling out coils of intestines and other viscera.

An adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is the plain empirical truth.

The hunter, whose name was Richard Parker, picked it up with his bare hands and, remembering how it had rushed to drink in the river, baptized it Thirsty. But the shipping clerk at the Howrah train station was evidently a man both befuddled and diligent. All the papers we received with the cub clearly stated that its name was Richard Parker, that the hunter’s first name was Thirsty and that his family name was None Given.

I thought of sustenance for the first time. I had not had a drop to drink or a bite to eat or a minute of sleep in three days.

How I had failed to notice for two and a half days a 450-pound Bengal tiger in a lifeboat twenty-six feet long was a conundrum I would have to try to crack later, when I had more energy.

But in the final set, when the challenger has nothing left to lose, he becomes relaxed again, insouciant, daring.

“God preserve me!” No supplication was ever more passionate yet more gently carried by the breath.

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 words Father, Mother, Ravi, India, Winnipeg struck me with searing poignancy.