Read like a wolf eats and write every day. Every. Single. Day.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of daily reading and writing as essential habits for learning and self-expression.
Gary Paulsen's quote encourages individuals to approach reading with the ferocity and dedication of a wolf that hunts for its food. It highlights the idea that consistent practice in both reading and writing is vital for personal and creative development, urging us to make these activities a daily ritual to foster knowledge and skill.
In practice
In a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of lifelong learning.
Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.
This beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath.
You're never the same after you run the Iditarod, and I still lust to go out and run with dogs, even though I know that I shouldn't. But I'd give just about anything to be able to do it again. To see the horizon again from the back of a dog team would be wonderful.
You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.
The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read.
I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.
There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
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