Quotes from Mark Twight

Relish the challenge of overcoming difficulties that would crush ordinary men...learn to suffer.

I don't actually care what I climb, only how it affects me. Which means the summit doesn't matter as much as the emotional process.

Frostbite? I consider that a failure.

Apperance is a Consequence of Fitness.

The simple fact is this: when you goto Alaska, you get your ass kicked.

Memories and hope are not so different; one is "having done" the other is "to do." Neither constitutes action. You are what you do; thus, if you do nothing, you are nobody. If you once did great things, you think you are great. You coast along on dead, preserved laurels, lifeless and wasting away.

The months of being disingenuously friendly and the resulting self-hatred taught me that self-confidence cannot be based on the approval of others.

There is risk, known and unknown, in all aspects of life. We often consider the loss of life the only serious risk. Unless we are genuinely aware, we calculate the danger arising from our own physical and emotional states and from external conditions based on incomplete information. If we believe we can manage those risks, we accept them. Whether these choices are born of delusion or reality comes out in the end.

We surround ourselves with people like ourselves. You become what you hang around.

Live the lifestyle instead of paying lip service to the lifesytle. Live with commitment. With emotional content. Live whatever life you choose honestly. Give up this renaissance man, dilettante bullshit of doing a lot of different things (and none of them very well by real standards). Get to the guts of one thing; accept, without casuistry, the responsability of making a choice.

Crested Butte is for spectators; Chamonix is for participants.

Eventually, I sickened of people, myself included, who don't think enough of themselves to make something of themselves-people who did only what they had to and never what they could have done. I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.

We may train ourselves to be adaptable as possible, to respond appropriately in each situation, but the ideal of controlling the outcome or steering events as they occur must be relinquished. Chaos rules it all.

If you can not grasp the consciousness-altering experience that real mastery of these disciplines proposes, of what value is your participation?

Appearance is the consequence of fitness, and confidence is a consequence of capability.

So go ahead, break stuff. Break yourself on the once-hard edges of yourself. And recycle the debris into the foundation of your future.