Jon Krakauer Quotes

Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around

My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.

His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.

At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder...

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

And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.

Relish the hardship.

My ignorance was inexcusable, and it made me ashamed.

In the adversarial system, it's more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.

"I [Lorna Craig] would say that teaching a girl that her salvation depends on her having sexual relations with a married man is inherently destructive." Such relationships, Craig argues bitterly, should be considered "a crime, not a religion."

It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.

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

When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath.… I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few metres this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again.

It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought. THEODORE ROSZAK, “IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS