Misery is optional.
None of that used to be in Brian and now it was a part of him, a changed part of him, a grown part of him, and the two things, his mind and his body, had come together as well, had made a connection with each other that he didn’t quite understand.
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.
You want to stay hungry... to learn. You get full, you get sleepy, lazy; you get lazy, you don’t learn.
The memory was like a knife cutting into him. Slicing deep into him with hate.
If his mother hadn’t begun to see him and forced the divorce, Brian wouldn’t be here now. He.
Change is good, but sometimes leaving things the way they’ve always been is better.
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.
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.
The burning eyes did not come back, but memories did, came flooding in. The words. Always the words. Divorce.
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. The plane gone, his family gone, all of it gone. They would not come. He was alone and there was nothing for him.
Well, he’d actually never heard anybody say it. But he felt that it should be true. There.
A person can do practically anything for a short time if he doesn’t think he has to do it for life.
There is always a solution. For everything. Always. Sometimes it isn’t pretty and takes a little longer, but there is still a solution.
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.
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.
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.
Never assume anything, expect the unexpected, be ready for everything all the time. And.
He was not the same. The plane passing changed him, the disappointment cut him down and made him new. 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.
He could not at first leave the fire.