Yann Martel’s 2001 fantasy-adventure novel “Life of Pi” won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Here are five quotes from it:

1. A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, "Stay out!" with its urine or other secretion, we say to it, "Stay in!" with our barriers.

2. First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.

3. To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you.

4. With just one glance I discovered that the sea is a city. Just below me [as I lay on the raft], all around, unsuspected by me, were highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were madly racing about, no doubt honking and hollering at each other.

5. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.