Gary Paulsen Quotes

Of course, the sea has tried to kill me on several occasions, has timed itself to coincide with my stupidity and put an end to me. Here in this beautiful lagoon, with time to think of things, and with serenity, some of the madness comes back to me now as I attempt the death-defying feat of eating a second Oreo with my tea.

Gone. We were out in the country and everything slowed down into rolling hills covered with snow. There were trees, but no leaves, and I could not remember seeing anything so white and clean. Winter in the city was gray and the snow was dirty, but out here it was so bright it hurt my eyes and I had to turn away.

he's not stupid, he's just not observant.

My folks were drunks, and I had a rough childhood - really rough - in fact, rougher than I thought about.

There were these things to do.

No, not secrets so much as just the Secret. What he knew and had not told anybody, what he knew about his mother that had caused the divorce, what he knew, what he knew--- the Secret.

Perhaps when I am grown I will not know anything. Perhaps that is the way it works, the way it is with growing. When you grow, you start to unlearn things.

But the beauty of the woods, the incredible joy of it is too alluring to be ignored, and I could not stand to be away from it
indeed, still can't
and so I ran dogs simply to run dogs; to be in and part of the forest, the woods

Then we knew he was lying.

I was raised on farms by people who didn't have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.

Everything was green, so green it went into him.

The person who reads can bail, but the person who doesn't fails.

Whoever says youth is the best time in your life has cash in hand and can't remember being poor.

For those of you who wish to get a feel for it, get in the car and bring it up to fifty miles an hour and then stick your head and arms outside and, while driving, try to fold up a simple bath towel in the wind

She was beautiful in a way that only wild things can be beautiful.

It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. The only reason I am here and not in prison is because of that woman. I was a loser, but she showed me the power of reading.

I ran the Iditarod twice. I finished once. I came in 42nd or 43rd place out of 70 plus teams the first time, and I scratched 80 miles from Nome the second time. You can read about my experience in the race in my books 'Woodsong' and 'Winterdance.'

This is going to be murder," Fransic whispered to Mr. Trimes. "Pure murder."
"I'm glad to see your confidence returning, Mr. Tucket. Just a few minutes ago you were ready to give up. Now you're talking about killing him."
"I meant it the other way."
"Oh.

I ran from the barn out through the herd to make certain and saw that the coyote was really dead, as was the sheep, but I ran smack into what makes border collies the incredible beings that they are. Louise grabbed at the coyote's neck, growling, and having made certain that it was dead, tried to bring the sheep back to life. She pulled at the ewe, trying to lift her to her feet, nudged at her ribs in a kind of crude CPR,

Adults are locked into car payments and divorces and work. They haven't got time to think fresh.

And he's never met anyone like Harris, his unruly daredevil of a cousin.

He could see it now. Oh, yes, all as he ran in the sun, his legs liquid springs.

School didn't work for me. I hated it.

I have a pickup truck. And I prefer to be with dogs or on my sailboat than in a car - actually, more than any other place on Earth.

It was a strange feeling, holding the rifle. It somehow removed him from everything around him. Without the rifle he had to fit in, to be part of it all, to understand it and use it - the woods, all of it. With the rifle, suddenly, he didn't have to know, did not have to be afraid or understand. He didn't have to get close to a foolbird to kill it - didn't have to know how it would stand if he didn't look at it and moved off to the side.
The rifle changed him, the minute he picked it up, and he wasn't sure he liked the change much.

He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that
it didn't work.

You want to stay hungry...to learn. You get full, you get sleepy, lazy; you get lazy, you don't learn.

You never beat the game...You go in, take what you need, get out. Never stay too long and never, never try to whip the game. Stay there too long and they figure you out, start chewing at the corners on you, know your betting. Then maybe two, three of them get together and whipsaw you.

Humans are the big thing that cause damage in life - in war or whatever - and if I can get away from that and into a wilderness situation, I'm OK. You can more or less live on your own merit.

The burning eyes did not come back, but memories did, came flooding in. The words. Always the words. Divorce.

I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea.

I sail, run dogs, ride horses, play professional poker and tell stories about the stuff I've been through. And I'm still a romantic; I still want Bambi to make it out of the fire.

I tried to contain myself... but I escaped!

Look at Inuit clothing. Their stuff still works better than Cabela's. I've made my own parkas, mukluks, footgear, and it is good to 60 degrees below zero. All I did was copy the patterns that came down from the Inuits.

The maximum expression of running dogs is the Iditarod. You enter a state of primitive exaltation, and you never return. You're never normal again.

That's all it took to solve problems - just sense.

We don't like to think of ourselves as prey - it is a lessening thought - but the truth is that in our arrogance and so-called knowledge we forget that we are not unique. We are part of nature as much as other animals, and some animals - sharks, fever-bearing mosquitoes, wolves and bear, to name but a few - perceive us as a food source, a meat supply, and simply did not get the memo about how humans are superior. It can be shocking, humbling, painful, very edifying and sometimes downright fatal to run into such an animal.

Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty. In the time I've got left, I intend to write artistic books - for kids - because they're still open to new ideas.

The vast country is still there, but it has somehow been altered by intrusions, "peopled" to death.
It is all gone, all changed, all tamed and pacified and cleaned and boiled and sanitized and made healthy and politically correct.

Lawn Boy by Gary Paulsen

There's nothing wrong with bad habits...Where would we be without our bad habits? They're what separates us from the dreary souls amongst us.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

Never assume anything, expect the unexpected, be ready for everything all the time. And

I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another.

(Y)ou've got to do more than what's expected if you want to get ahead.

He was out of food, but he could look tomorrow and he could build a signal fire tomorrow and get more wood tomorrow . . . The

He had forgotten the most important thing about living in the wilderness, the one thing he'd thought he would never forget-expect the unexpected. What you didn't think would get you, would get you. Plan on the worst and be happy when it didn't come.

I couldn't change the wind but perhaps I could reduce the effect of the wind on the boat.

Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do , and you must respond as they come.

Brian looked back and for a moment felt afraid because the wolf was so ... so right. He knew Brian, knew him and owned him and chose not to do anything to him. But the fear moved then, moved away,and Brian knew the wolf for what it was - another part of the woods, another part of all of it.

She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time.
And she was wonderfully unhinged.

In our family, we've always been owned by border collies, or dogs of one kind or another, and have rescued many dogs. We've lived in the woods and sometimes have had as many as 70 sled dogs. Or had six or seven dogs living in the house. Dogs have saved my life on more than one occasion - and I mean that literally.

Yes, I've been in an igloo. They're surprisingly cozy and warm - small, though, you can't really stand up in some.

You can take the man out of the woods, but you can't take the woods out of the man.

I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.

Simple. Keep it simple. I am Brian Robeson. I have been in a plane crash. I am going to find some food. I am going to find some berries. He

A person can do practically anything for a short time if he doesn't think he has to do it for life.

The best joy and beauty are the kinds that are unplanned, and the same is true of painting or poetry. Don't chew at it too much. It's beautiful, and it makes you remember a beautiful part of your life and that's enough.

Change is good, but sometimes leaving things the way they've always been is better.

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can't be in books.
The book needs you.

There is always a solution. For everything. Always. Sometimes it isn't pretty and takes a little longer, but there is still a solution.

A border collie saved me once when I was pinned under a horse in Colorado. And once when I went through the ice, one of my sled dogs saw me go under, and she got the rest of the team, and they pulled me out of 12 feet of water. I think that dogs offer the only form of unconditional love that's available to humans.

He reached now and ran one of Gretchen's soft ears through his gnarled, bent fingers, like silk through barbwire. "And I never saw it until I started with Gretchen. Got her to sit one day. The same day, she looked a long time at me and at a piece of cookie" - and here she perked up, ears more alert with the word "cookie" - "in my hand, and she saw the cookie and my eyes and then she sat. Clean and down. As much as if she'd said, 'I'll sit and then you give me that piece of cookie,' and she did and I did and it was the first time I knew I had been wrong all along. I never trained one animal. Not once . . ." "They trained you.

Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.

He widened the hole with his finger and looked inside.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.

Had it been just the two of us with the flock, I am sure it would have been a complete disaster. But Louie came with a helper, partner, friend, second brain: a border collie named (he must have wanted the similarities in names) Louise, and she quickly - after watching me for a moment and seeing how useless I was - took over completely.

I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night.

(Y)ou didn't want somebody running around smiling and saying, 'We'll get by,' when the house was on fire; you wanted somebody to yell 'fire!

You're never the same after you run the Iditarod, and I still lust to go out and run with dogs, even though I know that I shouldn't. But I'd give just about anything to be able to do it again. To see the horizon again from the back of a dog team would be wonderful.

My name is Brian Robeson and I am thirteen years old and I am alone in the north woods of Canada. All

about four inches down, he suddenly came into a small chamber in the cool-damp sand and there lay eggs, many eggs, almost perfectly round eggs the size of table tennis balls, and he laughed then because he knew. It had been a turtle.

We make a mistake in thinking we own pets - the animals open their lives up and make us a part of them.

Read like a wolf eats.

If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you'll come to bad luck.

There. I've poked my leg, rolled down a bank and been hit in the head with the canoe.
All simple things. All fixable things.

This is the final book about Brian

I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!

How could he? The

My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace. I became a street kid. Occasionally, I'd live with aunts or uncles, then I'd run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.

Not hope that he would be rescued
that was gone. But hope in his knowledge. Hope in the fact that he could learn and survive and take care of himself. Tough hope, he thought that night. I am full of though hope.

The most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work.

moose was a moose. There

But I'm your brother." Daniel sounded genuinely wounded. "You," she announced, "are a turd in the punch bowl of life.

It must have been a snapper

Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren't really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn't know they were insane.

He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.

I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.

All the luck in the world has to come every year, in every part of every year, or there is not a harvest and then the luck, the bad luck will come and everything we are, all that we can ever be, all the Einsteins and babies and love and hate, all the joy and sadness and sex and wanting and liking and disliking, all the soft summer breezes on cheeks and first snowflakes, all the Van Goghs and Rembrandts and Mozarts and Mahlers and Thomas Jeffersons and Lincolns and Ghandis and Jesus Christs, all the Cleopatras and lovemaking and riches and achievements and progress, all of that, every single damn thing that we are or ever will be is dependent on six inches of topsoil and the fact that the rain comes when it's needed and does not come when it is not needed; everything, every ... single ... thing comes with that luck.

To know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it's bad for them. They thinks we want what they got ... That's why they don't want us reading.

Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal.

This beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath ...

He could not at first leave the fire. It

What he did instead was clean his shelter. He had been sleeping on the foam pad that had come with the survival pack and he straightened everything up and hung his bag out in the sun to air-dry and then used the hatchet to cut the ends of new evergreen boughs and laid them like a carpet in the shelter. As soon as he brought the boughs inside and the heat from the fire warmed them they gave off the most wonderful smell, filled the whole shelter with the odor of spring, and he brought the bag back inside and spread the pad and bag and felt as if he were in a new home. The berries boiled first and he added snow water to them and kept them boiling until he had a kind of mush in the pan. By that time the meat had cooked and he set it off to the side and tasted the berry

The mosquitoes. Tearing at him, clouds of them, the awful, ripping, thick masses of the small monsters trying to bleed him dry.

But perhaps more than his body was the change in his mind, or in the way he was--was becoming. I am not the same, he thought. I see, I hear differently.