Quotes from Jon Krakauer

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. (…) I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

The accrued guilt and clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the festering familial sores, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose, and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best….I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

These murders are shocking for a host of reasons, but no aspect of the crimes is more disturbing than Lafferty's complete and determined absence of remorse.

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout—there may be no more potent force than religion

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk.

Despite the cordial exchange in Judge Hansen's court, by 1995 Dan had come to believe that Ron was a "child of the devil"—an agent of Satan who was bound and determined to kill Dan in order to prevent him from fulfilling the rest of the vital mission God has given Dan to carry out.

la felicidad sólo es real cuando es compartida.» Es

Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara,* and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are.

When you forgive, you love.

No Man Knows My History, her magnificent, contentious biography of Joseph

The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power.

Nadie debería negar [...] que el nomadismo siempre nos ha estimulado y llenado de júbilo. En nuestro pensamiento, la condición de nómada está asociada a escapar de la historia, la opresión, la ley y las obligaciones agobiantes, a un sentimiento de libertad absoluta, y el camino del nómada siempre conduce hacia el oeste. Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space Carthage

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.

la naturaleza es un lugar despiadado, al que le traen sin cuidado las esperanzas y anhelos de los viajeros. «Los

And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God—as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.

Laughter is always something that is a shared experience

long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

Mormon principles that had been forsaken by the modern LDS Church: plural marriage; the tenet that God and Adam, the first man, were one and the same; and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race.

Alaska ejerce una atracción magnética sobre los soñadores e inadaptados que creen que los enormes espacios inmaculados de la Última Frontera llenarán el vacío de su existencia.

Like being free to think for yourself.

We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home.

Por fin se había liberado de las ataduras, emancipado del mundo opresivo formado por sus padres y los que eran iguales que ellos, un mundo hecho de abstracciones, seguridad y bienestar material, un mundo en el que sentía como una dolorosa amputación la ausencia del latir puro y salvaje de la existencia. Al