Quotes from Gary Paulsen

events were burned into his memory and so he used them to remember time

Sometimes it is good to think of old things, old ways, and do the old stories when there is nothing to do but wait.

Everyone always feels better when there's a plan.

which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work.

hunger makes the best sauce.

Something that you would normally never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you're starving.

went into a state of overload and a kind of shock and open disbelief that people could actually live, or pretend to live, the way they did.

The fuel oil was too expensive so they turned the heaters down so it wasn't burning so much of their small monthly checks and they could still afford to buy and make two meat meals a week. But the cold brought them aches and pains so they came to the library where it was warm and they sat and talked and knitted scarves and mittens to give to their children who had moved away. They turned their house heaters down and lived on their memories in the library.

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.

So now I don't feel normal unless I've got a book in my hands, and I feel the most normal when I'm lost in a story and can ignore the complicated situations around me that never seem to work out as neatly as they do in books.

giving her endless boxes of Dots and candy corn

I would have died if not for Cookie.

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

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.

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.

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.

In sailing, I single-hand, and I want to do the Horn. The Horn is the maximum expression of sailing, the way the Iditarod is the maximum expression of running dogs. It's not to write about it; it's to experience the maximum thing.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Read like a wolf eats.