Quotes from Jon Krakauer

Every minute you remain at this altitude and above," he cautioned, "your minds and bodies are deteriorating." Brain cells were dying. Our blood was growing dangerously thick and sludgelike.

One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun.

But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad. . . . Everest

I'm going to have to be real careful not to accept any gifts from them in the future because they will think they have bought my respect.

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long , grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.

If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again, I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX.

He] seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn't know what it was. I was like that once, but then I realized what I was looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy! (pg.43)

I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more richly and intensely.

Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort.

Everett was strange,' Sleight concedes. 'Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.

Using data gathered in 2011, the CDC study estimated that across all age groups, 19.3 percent of American women "have been raped in their lifetimes" and that 1.6 percent of American women—nearly two and a half million individuals—"reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey.

I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me.

We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them -- that we shouldn't go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities.

I'm going to repeat that: Without the support of our Sherpas none of us has any chance of climbing the mountain.

Simply by recounting their stories and breaking that silence, survivors of sexual assault strike a powerful blow against their assailants.

And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic.

He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At 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.

That guy, he has done some bad things against me. If someone is bad to me, I must be bad to them. You know why? Because if you didn't, that guy will think you are a pussy guy. And then he will be bothering you all the time. You have to go against him back, you know?

Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.

could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years.

When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man's meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he'd been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz's life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he'd arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.

says Brother Richard, a wide, cheerful man with liver spots and a comb-over, who brags that he has twenty-eight grandchildren.