You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long.

The three religions because I wanted to discuss faith, not organized religion, so wanted to relativize organized religion by having Pi practice three. I would have like PI to be a Jew, too, to practice Judaism, but there are two religions that are explicitly incompatible: Christianity and Judaism. Where one begins, the other ends, according to Christians, and where one endures, the other strays, according to Jews.

Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.

It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.