Top 100 Jon Krakauer Quotes
#1. I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.
Jon Krakauer
#2. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#3. In the adversarial system, it's more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.
Jon Krakauer
#4. There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act - a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.
Jon Krakauer
#5. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#6. I think part of the appeal of Antarctica is experiencing some sort of power, the forces of the natural world.
Jon Krakauer
#7. I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.
Jon Krakauer
#8. Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.
Jon Krakauer
#9. Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.
Jon Krakauer
#10. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. Taske,
Jon Krakauer
#11. This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.
Jon Krakauer
#12. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.
Jon Krakauer
#13. I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
Jon Krakauer
#14. What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
Jon Krakauer
#15. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.
Jon Krakauer
#16. 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)
Jon Krakauer
#17. Common sense is no match for the voice of God.
Jon Krakauer
#18. Antarctica is a very alien environment, and you can't survive here more than minutes if you're not equipped properly and doing the right thing all the time.
Jon Krakauer
#19. The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.
Jon Krakauer
#20. People don't get it. He didn't even have a fuckin' map; what kind of idiot? THAT was the point. There's no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
Jon Krakauer
#21. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
Jon Krakauer
#22. Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.
Jon Krakauer
#23. Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from the tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.
Jon Krakauer
#24. There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.
Jon Krakauer
#25. The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and
Jon Krakauer
#26. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#27. My ignorance was inexcusable, and it made me ashamed.
Jon Krakauer
#28. When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines upon you.
Jon Krakauer
#29. That's a real big part of what holds this religion together: it's not having to make those critical decisions that many of us have to make, and be responsible for your decisions.
Jon Krakauer
#30. 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
Jon Krakauer
#31. When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
Jon Krakauer
#32. I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.
Jon Krakauer
#33. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#34. The way to Everest is not a Yellow Brick Road.
Jon Krakauer
#35. He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others ...
Jon Krakauer
#36. I read somewhere ... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong ... to measure yourself at least once.
Jon Krakauer
#37. I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.
Jon Krakauer
#38. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#39. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
Jon Krakauer
#40. My life was falling apart. But somehow I stuck it out.
Jon Krakauer
#41. If you're bumming out, you're not gonna get to the top, so as long as we're up here we might as well make a point of grooving. (Quoting Scott Fischer)
Jon Krakauer
#42. The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
Jon Krakauer
#43. Military investigations are designed not to find anyone guilty. And you can't investigate up the chain of command, which is a huge impediment.
Jon Krakauer
#44. You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
Jon Krakauer
#45. Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams ... Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming. -Doug Hansen
Jon Krakauer
#46. I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong; my strength is just somewhere else
it's in myself ... I do not fear what may await me, though I'm equally confident that nothing awaits.
Jon Krakauer
#47. Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.
Jon Krakauer
#48. How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?
Jon Krakauer
#49. With the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them;
Jon Krakauer
#50. He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon.
Jon Krakauer
#51. According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.
Jon Krakauer
#52. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#54. The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.
Jon Krakauer
#55. Finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans ... .
Jon Krakauer
#57. I love being outdoors, being in the mountains and the desert, and my wife enjoys that too. That's one of the things that sustain our relationship.
Jon Krakauer
#58. Many decisions are made in our lifetime, Most relatively insignificant while others life altering
Jon Krakauer
#59. If you're not a feminist, you're part of the problem.
Jon Krakauer
#60. But it also demonstrates how difficult it is to correct a false belief after people have made an emotional investment in that belief being true. When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.
Jon Krakauer
#61. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#62. He was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.
Jon Krakauer
#64. I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
Jon Krakauer
#65. to explore the inner country of his own soul.
Jon Krakauer
#66. S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?
Jon Krakauer
#67. While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear
Jon Krakauer
#68. To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrestled from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things than came easily.
Jon Krakauer
#69. You can get a lawyer with two months off or a New York socialite who wants to play at being Lewis and Clark and put them up there, but Everest is still in charge; it can still kick butt.
Jon Krakauer
#70. Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
Jon Krakauer
#71. The United States Violence Against Women Act of 2005 requires that all victims of sexual assault be given free access to an evidence collection kit,
Jon Krakauer
#72. Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones. -John Gill-
Jon Krakauer
#73. For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it's gone.
Jon Krakauer
#74. You hear that rape victims avoid sex afterwards. But it's actually just as common for some victims to become promiscuous in self-destructive ways.
Jon Krakauer
#75. It's not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.
Jon Krakauer
#76. In reality, the [American legal] system promotes chicanery, outright deceit, and other egregious conduct by trial lawyers.
Jon Krakauer
#77. It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty ...
Jon Krakauer
#78. Devout Buddhists believe in sonam - an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.
Jon Krakauer
#79. We understand that honor, truth and hard work win in the end. We are Montana.
Jon Krakauer
#80. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.
Jon Krakauer
#81. Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
-Chris McCandless
Jon Krakauer
#82. You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
Jon Krakauer
#83. Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
Jon Krakauer
#84. According to Montana law, Keteyian countered, a person who is physically incapacitated is incapable of providing consent. Given her extremely high blood alcohol level, he wondered, wasn't Belnap clearly incapacitated?
Jon Krakauer
#85. Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that care nothing for hope or longing.
Jon Krakauer
#86. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly.
Jon Krakauer
#87. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
Jon Krakauer
#88. Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.
Jon Krakauer
#89. Simply by recounting their stories and breaking that silence, survivors of sexual assault strike a powerful blow against their assailants.
Jon Krakauer
#90. Weeping ... betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.
Jon Krakauer
#91. The pieces I've written for 'Outside' magazine are definitely my best work, and they're virtually all about the outdoors.
Jon Krakauer
#92. On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother's house.
Jon Krakauer
#93. But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.
Jon Krakauer
#94. Rob Hall was, without doubt, the most competent guide in mountaineering.
Jon Krakauer
#95. Short form media is reductionist by nature.
Jon Krakauer
#96. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.
Jon Krakauer
#97. When I was 23, I went to Alaska by myself into the glaciers of the coast range and climbed a mountain by myself. It was incredibly reckless, incredibly stupid. But I was lucky. And I survived, and I came back to tell my story.
Jon Krakauer
#98. A rapist, by definition, is only interested in gratifying his own desires. A rapist doesn't care what a woman wants. If he did, he wouldn't rape. -
Jon Krakauer
#99. 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.' (pg. 96)
Jon Krakauer
#100. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards ...
Jon Krakauer
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