Gail Tsukiyama Quotes

When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.

I've always been able to survive by writing, though.

The country is making a big mistake not teaching kids to cook and raise a garden and build fires.

I do have a side of me that would just love to be stuck in the woods and have to stick it out and be really resourceful.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by myself by the time I'm 25, I have failed.

If you help a chicken out of an egg, most of the time that bird will die. If you help a moth out of a cocoon, it'll die because they don't go through that struggle and maturation. I can give you a fish for the day and you'll eat a day, but if I teach you to fish, you'll eat for a lifetime. Maybe even start a business.

I started to learn some common sense. Even just sort of day-to-day things. I started to cook a little bit more and try to learn to fix things around the house. If something breaks down, rather than call a guy, there's got to be more I can do.

I've always said that you were too smart to have a profession. Smart people are hopeless in the face of anything actual. They are terrible cooks. They cannot dress themselves. They are children who need guidance and protecting.

I've learned all I need to know to live under a bed.

I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

We are shut up in school and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse or a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing.

Never before have self-suffiency and education been so important, and they are virtually inseparable from survival.

If I had to sum up my practical skills, I would use one word: survival. And operating a hedge fund utilized my training in survival to the fullest.

I can cook, I can breathe, I can live!

I have realized that part of being Dauntless is being willing to make things more difficult for yourself in order to be self-sufficient. There's nothing especially brave about wandering dark streets with no flashlight, but we are not supposed to need help, even from light. We are supposed to be capable of anything. I like that. Because their might come a day when there is no flashlight, there is no gun, there is no guiding hand. And I want to be ready.

All over the US, there is a need to teach young people to, really, get them out in the backyard, building treehouses, fixing bicycles, because you become a better, more well-rounded, Renaissance personality if you actually know how to do things with your hands. If you can fix the screen door or replace your old garbage disposal, even change the tire on a car, a lot of people don't even know how to do that. We're literally running out of people who know how to do those things, the essential things like plumbing, carpentry, stone masonry, we're literally running out of them.

You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim

If you are without bread, how much wisdom can you boast and of what real utility are your talents, if you cannot procure for yourselves and save against a day of scarcity those substances designed to sustain your natural lives?

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim

One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)

Through eons of living in a land so poor there was little to eat but oats, they had as usual converted necessity into a virtue, and insisted that they liked the stuff.

Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.