Top 94 Gary Paulsen Quotes
#2. 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!
Gary Paulsen
#3. If you look at it from the right point of view, lying is just good manners.
Gary Paulsen
#5. I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.
Gary Paulsen
#6. Running with dogs is like dancing with winter
Gary Paulsen
#8. 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.'
Gary Paulsen
#9. The thing with dying was to try to not die and make death take you with surprise.
Gary Paulsen
#10. The person who reads can bail, but the person who doesn't fails.
Gary Paulsen
#11. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#12. 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
Gary Paulsen
#13. Years ago, when I was writing westerns, other writers who were friends of mine wanted me to collaborate with them. And it just didn't work.
Gary Paulsen
#14. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#16. Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination
except that it was all reality.
Gary Paulsen
#17. She was beautiful in a way that only wild things can be beautiful.
Gary Paulsen
#18. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#19. Never assume anything, expect the unexpected, be ready for everything all the time. And
Gary Paulsen
#21. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#22. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#23. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#24. Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it
Gary Paulsen
#25. But I'm your brother." Daniel sounded genuinely wounded. "You," she announced, "are a turd in the punch bowl of life.
Gary Paulsen
#26. The mosquitoes. Tearing at him, clouds of them, the awful, ripping, thick masses of the small monsters trying to bleed him dry.
Gary Paulsen
#27. discoveries happened because they needed to happen. He
Gary Paulsen
#28. And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.
Gary Paulsen
#29. And doing what is good for you is always the worst thing. Even if it works out all right in the end, it is the worst thing when it first happens - just the way things that seem good for you can turn out bad, bad as dirt.
Gary Paulsen
#30. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#31. It was, all in all, a grand example of interspecies lack of cooperation and the further illustration that might makes right. I stayed in the rest area, in my car, for another half an hour, until everything had settled down, and saw who emerged as the victor. The bees kept the water fountain.
Gary Paulsen
#32. My name is Brian Robeson and I am thirteen years old and I am alone in the north woods of Canada. All
Gary Paulsen
#33. 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 ...
Gary Paulsen
#34. I couldn't change the wind but perhaps I could reduce the effect of the wind on the boat.
Gary Paulsen
#35. Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do , and you must respond as they come.
Gary Paulsen
#36. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#37. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#38. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#39. Personal inspection at zero altitude. The stories come from my life - if not my own experiences, then about topics and subjects that interest me.
Gary Paulsen
#40. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#41. Adults are locked into car payments and divorces and work. They haven't got time to think fresh.
Gary Paulsen
#42. When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.
Gary Paulsen
#43. Reading is not daily its a life style for all readers.
Gary Paulsen
#44. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#45. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#46. Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal.
Gary Paulsen
#47. I was raised on farms by people who didn't have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.
Gary Paulsen
#48. Yes, I've been in an igloo. They're surprisingly cozy and warm - small, though, you can't really stand up in some.
Gary Paulsen
#49. The burning eyes did not come back, but memories did, came flooding in. The words. Always the words. Divorce.
Gary Paulsen
#50. [Russel] might not make it, he might die on the ice, but he would not die with fear. He would die working not to die...
Gary Paulsen
#51. You can take the man out of the woods, but you can't take the woods out of the man.
Gary Paulsen
#52. The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.
Gary Paulsen
#53. We make a mistake in thinking we own pets - the animals open their lives up and make us a part of them.
Gary Paulsen
#54. The most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work.
Gary Paulsen
#55. 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. It
Gary Paulsen
#56. And he's never met anyone like Harris, his unruly daredevil of a cousin.
Gary Paulsen
#57. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#58. I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.
Gary Paulsen
#59. Maybe it was always that way, discoveries happened because they needed to happen.
Gary Paulsen
#60. He had learned this: Nothing that lived, nothing that walked or crawled or flew or swam or slithered or oozed - nothing, not one thing on God's earth wanted to die. No matter what people thought or said about chickens or fish or cattle - they all wanted to live.
Gary Paulsen
#61. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#62. Gary Paulsen - If you work on something hard and get some success. You can get some nice rewards.
Gary Paulsen
#63. 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
Gary Paulsen
#65. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#66. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#68. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#69. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#70. He had read somewhere that wolves could eat up to twenty pounds of meat in a single meal and he thought the dog was coming close. She ... just ... kept ... eating.
Gary Paulsen
#71. He was out of food, but he could look tomorrow and he could build a signal fire tomorrow and get more wood tomorrow . . . The
Gary Paulsen
#72. Everything was green, so green it went into him.
Gary Paulsen
#73. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#74. As if my whole life up to that time had somehow been safe and now I would ruin all that because, you know, catamarans flip over.
Gary Paulsen
#75. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#76. He widened the hole with his finger and looked inside.
Gary Paulsen
#77. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#78. The book is that is the good one is Woodsong and we are trying to finish it.
Gary Paulsen
#79. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#82. My folks were drunks, and I had a rough childhood - really rough - in fact, rougher than I thought about.
Gary Paulsen
#83. Because every day in my journal I write down the best thing that's happened to me. And today it's you. When
When Johanna said that, I felt light, warm in that spot just above my stomach where it usually feels clenched and tight.
Gary Paulsen
#84. He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now ... He was alone and there was nothing for him.
Gary Paulsen
#85. I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night.
Gary Paulsen
#86. I tried to contain myself... but I escaped!
Gary Paulsen
#87. You want to stay hungry...to learn. You get full, you get sleepy, lazy; you get lazy, you don't learn.
Gary Paulsen
#88. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#89. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#91. 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.
Gary Paulsen
#93. Tomorrow. He watched the flames and smiled. Tomorrow I'll see. All things come tomorrow.
Gary Paulsen
#94. That's all it took to solve problems - just sense.
Gary Paulsen
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
