Gary Paulsen Quotes

If his mother hadn’t begun to see him and forced the divorce, Brian wouldn’t be here now.

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

In measured time forty-seven days had passed since the crash. Forty-two days, he thought, since he had died and been born as the new Brian. When the plane had come and gone it had put him down, gutted him and dropped him and left him with nothing.

he wasn’t sure if it was good and clean or not.

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

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

never say never

I am full of tough hope

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

Maybe it was always that way, discoveries happened because they needed to happen.

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.

Sometimes it would be nice if life just kept happening the way it's happening, if things got to a good place and just stayed there, didn't change.

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 was not the same. The plane passing changed him, the disappointment cut him down and made him new. He was not the same and would never be again like he had been. That was one of the true things, the new things. And the other one was that he would not die, he would not let death in again.

So this summer, this first summer when he was allowed to have “visitation rights” with his father, with the divorce only one month old, Brian was heading north. His father was a mechanical engineer who had designed or invented a new drill bit for oil drilling, a self-cleaning, self-sharpening bit. He was working in the oil fields of Canada, up on the tree line where the tundra started and the forests ended. Brian was riding up from New York with some drilling equipment — it was lashed down in the rear of the plane next to a fabric bag the pilot had called a survival pack, which had emergency supplies in case they had to make an emergency landing — that had to be specially made in the city, riding in the bushplane with the pilot named Jim or Jake or something who had turned out to be an all right guy, letting him fly and all.