Quotes from Hatchet

Gary Paulsen ·  208 pages

Rating: (248.1K votes)


“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, quote from Hatchet


“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. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that--it didn't work.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“That's all it took to solve problems - just sense.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“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, quote from Hatchet



“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, quote from Hatchet


“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, quote from Hatchet


“Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“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, quote from Hatchet


“He could see it now. Oh, yes, all as he ran in the sun, his legs liquid springs.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet



“the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“It was a strange feeling, holding the rifle. It somehow removed him from everything around him. Without the rifle he had to fit in, to be part of it all, to understand it and use it - the woods, all of it. With the rifle, suddenly, he didn't have to know, did not have to be afraid or understand. He didn't have to get close to a foolbird to kill it - didn't have to know how it would stand if he didn't look at it and moved off to the side.
The rifle changed him, the minute he picked it up, and he wasn't sure he liked the change much.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“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, quote from Hatchet


“Everything was green, so green it went into him.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“I am full of tough hope”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet



“Maybe it was always that way, discoveries happened because they needed to happen.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“He moved to the trees. Where the bark was peeling from the trunks it lifted in tiny tendrils, almost fluffs. Brian plucked some of them loose, rolled them in his fingers. They seemed flammable, dry and nearly powdery. He pulled and twisted bits off the trees, packing them in one hand while he picked them with the other, picking and gathering until he had a wad close to the size of a baseball. Then he went back into the shelter and arranged the ball of birchbark peelings at the base of the black rock. As an afterthought he threw in the remains of the twenty-dollar bill. He struck and a stream of sparks fell into the bark and quickly died. But this time one spark fell on one small hair of dry bark—almost a thread of bark—and seemed to glow a bit brighter before it died. The material had to be finer. There had to be a soft and incredibly fine nest for the sparks. I must make a home for the sparks, he thought. A perfect home or they won’t stay, they won’t make fire. He started ripping the bark, using his fingernails at first, and when that didn’t work he used the sharp edge of the hatchet, cutting the bark in thin slivers, hairs so fine they were almost not there. It was painstaking work, slow work, and he stayed with it for over two hours. Twice he stopped for a handful of berries and once to go to the lake for a drink. Then back to work, the sun on his back, until at last he had a ball of fluff as big as a grapefruit—dry birchbark fluff.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“The memory was like a knife cutting into him. Slicing deep into him with hate. The”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“Well, he’d actually never heard anybody say it. But he felt that it should be true. There”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“If his mother hadn’t begun to see him and forced the divorce, Brian wouldn’t be here now. He”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet



“He could not at first leave the fire. It”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“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, quote from Hatchet


“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, quote from Hatchet


“It must have been a snapper”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“He widened the hole with his finger and looked inside.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet



“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, quote from Hatchet


“The burning eyes did not come back, but memories did, came flooding in. The words. Always the words. Divorce.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“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. He had to keep hoping.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


“There were these things to do.”
― Gary Paulsen, quote from Hatchet


About the author

Gary Paulsen
Born place: in Minneapolis, Minnesota, The United States
Born date May 17, 1939
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Popular quotes

“If you want help for your dream, start by helping someone else with their dream. If you want support for your hope, start by giving support to someone else’s hope. If you want encouragement as you work on your calling, start by encouraging other people. Giving support is often the best way to get it.”
― Jon Acuff, quote from Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters


“Sono gli impiegati che inventano, in fin dei conti, tutte queste scartoffie [i passaporti] per avvelenare la vita agli uomini, e le loro disposizioni non vanno prese troppo sul serio.”
― Czesław Miłosz, quote from Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition


“Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quote from The Social Contract


“My father was taking me as seriously as the Ringolds were, but not with Ira’s political fearlessness, with Murray’s literary ingenuity, above all, with their seeming absence of concern for my decorum, for whether I would or would not be a good boy. The Ringolds were the one-two punch promising to initiate me into the big show, into my beginning to understand what it takes to be a man on the larger scale. The Ringolds compelled me to respond at a level of rigor that felt appropriate to who I now was. Be a good boy wasn’t the issue with them. The sole issue was my convictions. But then, their responsibility wasn’t a father’s, which is to steer his son away from the pitfalls. The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn’t. He has to worry about his son’s conduct, he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he’s worrying about the pitfalls—if he wasn’t, it would be wrong. But he’s finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life’s very first pit. And then, all on his own—providing real unity to his existence—to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall.”
― Philip Roth, quote from I Married a Communist


“Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.
Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.
The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.
But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with woman you love.
Well, what remains in your skin ,your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.
In other words, auto suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don't know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you'd kill him.
But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it's possible to look at him without horror; and believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you'd approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you have reached my degree of perfection, you'd actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he's a good chap.
In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine


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