Gary Paulsen Quotes

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

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.

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.

We have grown away from knowledge, away from knowing what something is really like, toward knowing only what somebody else says it is like. There seems to be a desire to ignore the truth in favor of drama.

I have seen their humor and anger expressed in natural terms and learned more about them as dogs and not just extensions of human training.

"I wish I had a dollar for every hour I've spent in the library," he always says. I have to agree- we'd probably never have to worry about money 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.

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

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.

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

"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."

This is the final book about Brian

Listen to me, he thought. If I were talking out loud, I’d be whining. Derek gets hit and I act like I’m the one getting messed up.

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.

kep on trying