Quotes from Jon Krakauer

The urge to catalog the myriad blunders in order to "learn from the mistakes" is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception.

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

We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.

But then I'm not easily shocked. I've had several friends who drowned or got murdered or died in weird accidents. In Alaska you get used to strange stuff happening.

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

When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines upon you

The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times. ANNIE DILLARD, HOLY THE FIRM  

how difficult it is for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth . . . 'The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent...' (pg. 185)

I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice. DONALD BARTHELME, THE DEAD FATHER

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. . . .

When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.

But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.

buffeted by the passions and longings of youth.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot bear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned. William Butler Yeats                   "The Second Coming"  

La mia opinione è che non hai bisogno né di me né di nessun altro per portare questa gioia nella tua vita. È semplicemente lì che ti aspetta, che aspetta di essere afferrata, e tutto quello che devi fare è tendere la mano per prenderla. L'unica persona con cui combatti è te stesso e la tua testardaggine a non lanciarti in nuove esperienze.

What distinguishes gurus from more orthodox teachers is not their manic-depressive mood swings, not their thought disorders, not their delusional beliefs, not their hallucinatory visions, not their mystical states of ecstasy: it is their narcissism.* ANTHONY STORR, FEET OF CLAY

I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.

Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he'd been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it.

Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched a contingent of federal officials to restore the rule of law in Utah, including a new territorial governor to replace Brigham Young. More ominously, the new president ordered twenty-five hundred heavily armed soldiers to escort these officials into Salt Lake City and subdue the Saints if necessary. For all intents and purposes, the United States had declared war on the Mormons.

Because it is there

I have some good friends here, but no one really understands why I am here or what I do. I don't know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone.

Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.