Jon Krakauer Quotes

When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines through you.

The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.

Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendship, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limit.... A passion for life is contagious and uplifting. Passion cuts both ways.... Those that make you feel on top of the world are equally able to turnit upside down.

The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only...from human relationships. God has placed it all around us...and all you have to do is reach for it.

Early on a difficult climb, especially a solo climb, you’re hyper-aware of the abyss pulling at your back, constantly feeling its call, its immense hunger. To resist takes tremendous conscious effort, you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The void puts you on edge, makes your movements tentative and clumsy. But as the climb continues, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are.

There is something special about a quiet untouched forest that just pulls you into the moment. Something that no parks will ever be able to achieve. Isn't that what we're all searching for in life? To just be happy and content in the moment, to just be there in the "now"?

But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.

I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.

That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.

When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.

An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.

Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.

If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.

The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.

I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.

Its not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.

Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.

The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism - his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.

Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, 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.

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.

HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED