Quotes from Joe Simpson

Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in?

Clouds hid the peaks and only their flanks were visible beneath a murky ceiling.

Part of what makes him (laid-back Tim Hudson)an ace is that he would never acknowledge that he is an ace.

If you succeed with one dream...it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious, a bit more dangerous

my eyes blurred wetly with hot tears

There is something about mountains that moves the soul. They arouse a powerful sense of spiritual awareness and a notion of our own transient and fragile mortality and our insignificant place in the universe. They have about them an ethereal, evocative addiction that I find impossible to resist. They are an infuriating and fascinating contradiction. Climbing rarely makes sense but nearly always feels right.

He was still grinning, and his confidence was infectious. Who said one man can't rescue another, I thought. We had changed from climbing to rescue, and the partnership had worked just as effectively. We hadn't dwelt on the accident. There had been an element of uncertainty at first, but as soon as we had started to act positively everything had come together.

Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in? I'll never know. -

My body isn't designed for walking. It's entirely the wrong shape. The legs are far too short and the whole trunk is shaped exactly to fit into seats and be carried comfortably to its destination, preferably by something fast and exciting, such as a sports car or a helicopter.

He had sat numb, repeatedly questioning why his own tumble had been held on the same piton just before the Japanese leader had fallen and ripped it out. A day later he was his normal self again: an experience absorbed, shelved in his memory, understood and accepted, and left at that.

We live within such a tiny capsule of time yet it seems vast until death rudely makes it so insignificant.

Youth is not a time of life … it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips and supple knees … it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigour of the emotions … it is a freshness of the deep springs of life.' Unknown.

The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

There is a peculiar anonymity about being in tents. Once the zip is closed and the outside world barred from sight, all sense of location disappears.