Gary Paulsen Quotes

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

Just as bad things could snowball, Brian found that good things could come fast as well.

Which Brian had done. They had taken off and that was the last of the conversation. There had been the initial excitement, of course. He had never flown in a single-engine plane before and to be sitting in the copilot’s seat with all the controls right there in front of him, all the instruments in his face as the plane clawed for altitude, jerking and sliding on the wind currents as the pilot took off, had been interesting and exciting. But in five minutes they had leveled off at six thousand feet and headed northwest and from then on the pilot had been silent, staring out the front, and the drone of the engine had been all that was left. The drone and the sea of green trees that lay before the plane’s nose and flowed to the horizon, spread with lakes, swamps, and wandering streams and rivers.

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

All right, he thought, take one thing at a time. Just one thing.
I poked my leg with an arrow.
There. Good. I pulled the arrow out. My leg still works. It must not have been a broadhead because it didn't go in very deep. Good.
My tent collapsed. There. Another thing. I'm in a tent and it collapsed. I just have to find the front zipper and get out and climb up the bank. Easy now, easy.
Something hit me on the head. What? Something big that thunked. The canoe. The wind picked up the canoe and it hit me.

Tomorrow. He watched the flames and smiled. Tomorrow I'll see. All things come tomorrow.

All of flying is easy. Just takes learning. Like everything else. Like everything else.

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.

"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.

But it was a mental thing. He had gotten depressed thinking about how they hadn't found him yet, and when he was busy and had something to do the depression seemed to leave.

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.

The hatchet. The key to it all. Nothing without the hatchet. Just that would take all his thanks.

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.

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

"I'm sorry. I was just running them. Running the dogs." I swallowed more soup and looked at the sky. The cold air was so clear the stars seemed to be falling to the ground. Like you could walk right. . . over . . . there and pick them up just lying on the snow. "I couldn't come back."