Climbing Quotes - Page 19

Women often focus more on staying friends, which is as important as climbing the mountain.

But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.

Anyone need advice on making the transition from 5.12 to 5.11?

Routes rate me, not the other way around.

What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.

My next climb is going to be a tourist troll in a wheelchair.

Many have questioned the quality of this sort of achievement, deploring the use of pitons, tension traverses and expansion bolts, but the record speaks for itself. This is a technical age and climbers will continue in the future to look for new routes. There is nothing more satisfying than being a pioneer.

To me, climbing is like eating or drinking. I have to do it; it's part of my life.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

Don't point your finger to the heights your children should go. Start climbing and they will follow.

I wonder if one can view risk like a drug, beneficial to the organism in the proper dose. Too much or too little may be harmful.

Climbers seem to forget that we said in our introduction that there were simply '50 classic routes', not 'the 50 classics'. We chose 50 from a list of about 120. Only a torturer will ever pry loose from our lips the names of those other 70 classics.

If you don't set your goals based upon your Mission Statement, you may be climbing the ladder of success only to realize, when you get to the top, you're on the WRONG building.

The end of the ridge and the end of the world... then nothing but that clear, empty air. There was nowhere else to climb. I was standing on the top of the world.

I am doing the mountain climbing to empower women.

Magic is the only way to describe it, climbing pitch after pitch of the most perfect, beautifully sculpted granite in the world.

There may be more to learn from climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.

The thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but there's a view from top every time when you finally get there.

[On social climbing:] Everything that goes up must come down.

Each fresh peak ascended teaches something.

There's no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It's experiencing the climb itself - in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue - that has to be the goal.

I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.

Climbing is one of the few sports in which the arena (the cliffs, the mountains and their specific routes) acquire a notoriety that outpopulates, outshines and outlives the actual athletes.

Then came a bigger fear. Not the threat of imminent injury, but the fear that if I didn't go back up, I would be a chickenshit forever.

If we dedicate ourselves over and over again to the goal of climbing one peak to the next...resisting the urge to become discouraged by the task-every one of us can become a high achiever.