Top 100 Gary Paulsen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If his mother hadn’t begun to see him and forced the divorce, Brian wouldn’t be here now. He.”

— Gary Paulsen

52. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

53. “The mosquitoes. Tearing at him, clouds of them, the awful, ripping, thick masses of the small monsters trying to bleed him dry.”

— Gary Paulsen

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

— Gary Paulsen

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

— Gary Paulsen

56. “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

57. “A person can do practically anything for a short time if he doesn’t think he has to do it for life.”

— Gary Paulsen

58. “I know that my life on boats has been about this: not the sailing or the sea so much as learning about self. And almost every boat I have had has taught me something.”

— Gary Paulsen

59. “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

60. “Whoever says youth is the best time in your life has cash in hand and can’t remember being poor.”

— Gary Paulsen

61. “It stopped him, the idea of giving thanks. At first his mind just stopped and he thought, for what? For the plane crash, for being here? I should thank somebody for that? Then a small voice, almost a whisper, came into his mind and all it said was: It could have been worse; you could have been down in the plane with the pilot. And.”

— Gary Paulsen

62. “Perhaps when I am grown I will not know anything. Perhaps that is the way it works, the way it is with growing. When you grow, you start to unlearn things.”

— Gary Paulsen

63. “I couldn’t change the wind but perhaps I could reduce the effect of the wind on the boat.”

— Gary Paulsen

64. “Kind of like a pear, he had thought, with a point on one end and a fat little body; a flying pear.”

— Gary Paulsen

65. “She was beautiful in a way that only wild things can be beautiful.”

— Gary Paulsen

66. “You eat the gut berries, you throw up. Don’t eat the gut berries.”

— Gary Paulsen

67. “The thing with dying was to try to not die and make death take you with surprise.”

— Gary Paulsen

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

— Gary Paulsen

69. “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

70. “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

71. “He was what he was, and if he was wrong or had mental problems, that was still the way he was, the way he had to live.”

— Gary Paulsen

72. “I began to understand that they are not wrong or right – they just are. Wolves don’t know they are wolves. That’s a name we have put on them, something we have done. I do not know how wolves think of themselves, nor does anybody, but I did know and still know that it was wrong to think they should be the way I wanted them to be.”

— Gary Paulsen

73. “He widened the hole with his finger and looked inside.”

— Gary Paulsen

74. “Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve ‘This Side of Wild’ Excerpt.”

— Gary Paulsen

75. “We each live in our own time... And we must do the best we can with our time. Those who came before weren’t as lucky as us and we aren’t as lucky as some who may come later. We must still live in our own time and do the best we can.”

— Gary Paulsen

76. “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

77. “There were these things to do.”

— Gary Paulsen

78. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

79. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

80. “Of course, the sea has tried to kill me on several occasions, has timed itself to coincide with my stupidity and put an end to me. Here in this beautiful lagoon, with time to think of things, and with serenity, some of the madness comes back to me now as I attempt the death-defying feat of eating a second Oreo with my tea.”

— Gary Paulsen

81. “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

82. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

83. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

84. “The answer to his problem had come to.”

— Gary Paulsen

85. “There’s nothing wrong with bad habits... Where would we be without our bad habits? They’re what separates us from the dreary souls amongst us.”

— Gary Paulsen

86. “How could he? The.”

— Gary Paulsen

87. “He could not at first leave the fire.”

— Gary Paulsen

88. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

89. “Well, he’d actually never heard anybody say it. But he felt that it should be true. There.”

— Gary Paulsen

90. “So. So. So here I am.” And there it is, he thought. For.”

— Gary Paulsen

91. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen

92. “It must have been a snapper.”

— Gary Paulsen

93. “Then we knew he was lying.”

— Gary Paulsen

94. “Tomorrow. He watched the flames and smiled. Tomorrow I’ll see. All things come tomorrow.”

— Gary Paulsen

95. “Gone. We were out in the country and everything slowed down into rolling hills covered with snow. There were trees, but no leaves, and I could not remember seeing anything so white and clean. Winter in the city was gray and the snow was dirty, but out here it was so bright it hurt my eyes and I had to turn away.”

— Gary Paulsen

96. “Getting out of trouble is a whole lot more of a hassle than staying out of trouble.”

— Gary Paulsen

97. “Gary Paulsen – “If you work on something hard and get some success. You can get some nice rewards.”

— Gary Paulsen

98. “Misery is optional.”

— Gary Paulsen

99. “I am not supposed to see this God. No person is supposed to see this. How can You let this happen?”

— Gary Paulsen

100. “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.”

— Gary Paulsen