Jon Krakauer Quotes

American writer and journalist

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Jon Krakauer (born April 12, 1954) is an American journalist, author of non-fiction books, and mountaineer. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Although he is perhaps best known as an "adventure writer," Krakauer has in fact written about a wide range of subjects since very early in his career.

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Relish the hardship.

He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.

"Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep.

Neither Emma's tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.

And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he'd finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you'd call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.

"Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones." -John Gill-

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.

...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...

says Brother Richard, a wide, cheerful man with liver spots and a comb-over, who brags that he has twenty-eight grandchildren.

That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.

Rape, Boylan pointed out, is the only crime in which the victim is presumed to be lying.

Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.

<...> though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won't be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991 - January 7, 1992. But this is not important. It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.