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.
And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.
School didn’t work for me. I hated it.
Adults are locked into car payments and divorces and work. They haven’t got time to think fresh.
Stories are like a river that flows – you dip a bucket in it.
The person who reads can bail, but the person who doesn’t fails.
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.
That’s all it took to solve problems – just sense.
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.
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.
Running with dogs is like dancing with winter.
I am full of tough hope.
Maybe it was always that way, discoveries happened because they needed to happen.
In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong – going wrong. The plane didn’t land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn’t know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death and now we’re out here going la-de-da, I’ve got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries.
I couldn’t change the wind but perhaps I could reduce the effect of the wind on the boat.
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.