Life of Pi (2012)

Share this quote on facebook Explaining his development of the nickname Pi, as a response to schoolyard taunting about his birthname "Piscine Molitor Patel"

Share this quote on facebook Step 4: Disregard Steps 1 through 3.

Share this quote on facebook Mocking his son's accumulation of religious faiths.

Share this quote on facebook Believing in everything at the same time, is the same as not believing in anything at all.

Share this quote on facebook Gita Patel: My sons and I are vegetarians. Do you have anything…? No, no, no. Not more gravy.
Cook: You don't want gravy?
Gita Patel: No, I want something vegetarian.
Cook: Oh. No problem.
Santosh Patel: She asked if you have something vegetarian.
Cook: The cow that produced this liver was vegetarian, the pigs that went into these sausages were vegetarian.
Santosh Patel: Very funny. But my wife doesn't eat liver.
Cook: Then she can eat the sausage, the rice, and the gravy. Or you can cook your own food.
Santosh Patel: How dare you talk to my wife like that?
Cook: Here's your rice. I cook for sailors, not curry-eaters.
Santosh Patel: [strangles him] What did you say?!
Cook: Let go of me! Who do you think you are? You're nothing but a servant! I feed people! You feed monkeys!

Share this quote on facebook Older Insurance investigator: Thousands of meerkats on a floating carnivorous island and no one has ever seen it?
Pi Patel: Yes. Just like I told you.
Younger Insurance investigator: Bananas don't float.
Older Insurance investigator: [Japanese] Why are you talking about bananas?
Younger Insurance investigator: You said the orangutan floated to you on a bundle of bananas, but bananas don't float.
Older Insurance investigator: [Japanese] Are you sure about that?
Pi Patel: Of course they do. You try it for yourself.
Older Insurance investigator: In any case, we're not here to talk about the bananas or meerkats.
Pi Patel: Look, I've just told you a long story and I'm very tired.
Older Insurance investigator: We're here because a Japanese cargo ship sank in the Pacific.
Pi Patel: Something I'll never forget. I lost my whole family.
Older Insurance investigator: We don't mean to push you. And you have our deepest sympathies. But we have come a long way, and we are no closer to understanding why the ship sank.
Pi Patel: Because I don't know! I was asleep, something woke me up, it could've been an explosion, I can't be sure. And then the ship sank. What else do you want from me?
Younger Insurance investigator: A story that won't make us look like fools.
Older Insurance investigator: We need a simpler story for our report. One our company can understand. A story we can all believe.
Pi Patel: So — a story without things you've never seen before. A story without surprises, without animals or islands.
Older Insurance investigator: Yes — the truth.

Share this quote on facebook Pi Patel: Four of us survived. The cook and the sailor were already aboard. The cook threw me a life buoy and pulled me aboard and Mother held on to some bananas and made it to the lifeboat. The cook was a disgusting man. He ate a rat. We had food enough for weeks, but he found the rat in the first few days and he killed it, dried it in the sun and ate it. He was such a brute, that man. But he was resourceful. It was his idea to build the raft to catch fish. We would have died in those first few days without him. The sailor was the same man who brought rice and gravy, the Buddhist. We didn't understand much of what he said, only that he was suffering. He had broken his leg horribly in the fall. We tried to set it best we could, but the leg became infected, and the cook said we had to do something or he'd die. The cook said he'd do it, but Mother and I had to hold the man down. And I believed him, we needed to do it. So… I kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry", and he just kept looking at me. His eyes were so… I'll never understand the point of that man suffering. I can still hear him. The happy Buddhist, he only ate rice and gravy. We didn't save him of course. He died. The morning after, the cook caught his first dorado and I didn't understand what he had done at first, but Mother did and I had never seen Mother so angry. "Stop whining and be happy," he said. "We need more food or we'll die. That was the whole point." "What was the whole point?" Mother asked. "You let that poor boy die in order to get bait, you monster!" The cook got furious. He started towards her with his fist raised, and Mother slapped him hard, right across the face. I was stunned. I thought he was going to kill her right there and then. But he didn't. The cook didn't stop at bait either, no. The sailor… he went the same way the rat went. The cook was a resourceful man. It was s week later that he… Because of me. Because I couldn't hold on to a stupid turtle. It slipped out of my hands and swam away. And the cook came up and he punched me on the side of my head and my teeth clacked and I saw stars. I thought he was going to hit me again, but Mother started pounding on him with her fists screaming, "Monster, monster!" She yelled at me to got to the raft. I thought she was going with me, or I'd never have… I didn't know why I didn't make her go first. I think about that every day. I jumped over and turned back just as the knife came out. There wasn't anything I could do. I couldn't look away. He threw her body overboard. And then the sharks came, and I saw what they… I saw. The next day I killed him. He didn't even fight back. He knew he had gone too far, even by his own standards. He left out the knife on the bench and I did to him what he did to the sailor. He was such an evil man, but worse still, he brought out the evil in me. I have to live with that. I was alone in a life boat, drifting across the Pacific Ocean, and I survived.
Adult Pi Patel: After that, they had no more questions. The investigators didn't seem to like the story, exactly, but they thanked me, they wished me well, and they left.
Writer: So the stories — both the zebra and the sailor broke their leg. And the hyena killed the zebra and the orangutan, so the hyena is the cook, the sailor is the zebra, your mother is the orangutan, and you're the tiger.