We make a mistake in thinking we own pets – the animals open their lives up and make us a part of them.
Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination – except that it was all reality.
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.
I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night.
The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated – it’s all bad.
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.