The River Quotes

“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, The River

“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.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“The answer to his problem had come to”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“How could he? The”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“He realized that he was not always right, was, indeed, often not right, and at the same time he found that others were not always wrong.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“He decided to stop every hour for ten minutes. Derek had told him once that that was what the military did on long marches—a ten-minute break every hour”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“unstable, the”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“awful,”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

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

“demanding. He turned to see Derek, who was coming up the back of the hill. “See the fish—”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“Fifty-four days,” Brian said. “Not quite two months. Yes—that’s me.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“There was a slashing, new, impossibly loud crack as lightning seemed to hit the shelter itself and Brian saw the top of the pine next to the opening suddenly explode and felt/saw the bolt come roaring down the tree, burning and splitting and splintering the wood and bark, and he saw it hit Derek.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“I have, Brian thought, always been wet.
Always
Even my soul is wet.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“What was the main problem - the worst of it?"
And he thought at first of mosquitoes, started to tell her about them and shook his head.
"Hunger."
"Really?" She seemed surprised. "I thought it would be the danger, or being alone, or the weather."
"I don't mean hunger like you're thinking of it," he had told her. "Not just when you miss a meal and and feel like eating a little bit. Or even if you go a day without eating. I mean when you don't think you're ever going to eat again - don't know if there will ever be more food. An end to food. Where you won't eat and you won't eat and you still won't eat and even when you die and are gone, even then there won't be any food. That kind of hunger.”
― Gary Paulsen, By Gary Paulsen The River [Mass Market Paperback]

“There were so many variables, so many ways to go wrong.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“The contour”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“sex”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“He had not slept the night before except to doze kneeling next to Derek, and he had worked hard all day on the raft getting it ready, and when the sun went down and the darkness caught him he could not believe how much he wanted to sleep.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River

“The hunger was the worst, worse than the mosquitoes, worse than any of it.”
― Gary Paulsen, The River