Top 100 Krakauer Quotes
#1. Adventure books are my personal favorites. 'The Endurance,' a story about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctica expedition, or 'Into Thin Air,' Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.
Dean Karnazes
#2. The thing that is most beautiful about Antarctica for me is the light. It's like no other light on Earth, because the air is so free of impurities. You get drugged by it, like when you listen to one of your favorite songs. The light there is a mood-enhancing substance.
Jon Krakauer
#3. 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
#4. The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
Jon Krakauer
#5. 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
#6. My life was falling apart. But somehow I stuck it out.
Jon Krakauer
#7. 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
#8. 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?
Jon Krakauer
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.
Jon Krakauer
#13. He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others ...
Jon Krakauer
#14. The way to Everest is not a Yellow Brick Road.
Jon Krakauer
#15. 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
#16. He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.
Jon Krakauer
#17. When cops and prosecutors fail to aggressively pursue sexual-assault cases, Kevin argued, it sends a message to sexual predators that women are fair game and can be raped with impunity.
Jon Krakauer
#18. When I went to Everest, I underestimated things. I just didn't know what altitude could do. Or the cold - I especially didn't appreciate the cold. It can be just debilitating, and things can happen so quickly.
Jon Krakauer
#19. 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
#20. Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.
Jon Krakauer
#21. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.
Jon Krakauer
#22. When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
Jon Krakauer
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines upon you.
Jon Krakauer
#26. My ignorance was inexcusable, and it made me ashamed.
Jon Krakauer
#27. His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.
Jon Krakauer
#28. He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.
Jon Krakauer
#29. 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
#31. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz's life even as he helped fill it.
Jon Krakauer
#33. Finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans ... .
Jon Krakauer
#34. And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he'd finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you'd call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.
Jon Krakauer
#35. When an individual is raped in this country, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets away with the crime.
Jon Krakauer
#36. The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.
Jon Krakauer
#38. 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
Jon Krakauer
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
Jon Krakauer
#43. He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon.
Jon Krakauer
#44. And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness ... . And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.
Jon Krakauer
#45. 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
#46. 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
#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. 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
#49. [Chris] gave his life in exchange for knowledge and his story is his contribution to the world. I feel complete now to put this story behind me as it was on my mind for quite some time.
Krakauer Jon
#50. 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
#51. You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
Jon Krakauer
#52. I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.
Jon Krakauer
#53. What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
Jon Krakauer
#54. I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
Jon Krakauer
#55. I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me.
Jon Krakauer
#56. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.
Jon Krakauer
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I don't know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It's really hard. Some days are better than others, but it's going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.
Jon Krakauer
#60. 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
#61. As I point out in the very first pages of 'Into the Wild,' I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist.
Jon Krakauer
#62. Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.
Jon Krakauer
#63. In Missoula, Grizzly football exists in a realm apart, where there is a pervasive sense of entitlement. University of Montana fans, coaches, players, and their lawyers expect, and often receive, special dispensation.
Jon Krakauer
#64. Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
Jon Krakauer
#65. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.
Jon Krakauer
#66. He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.
Jon Krakauer
#67. I think part of the appeal of Antarctica is experiencing some sort of power, the forces of the natural world.
Jon Krakauer
#68. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#69. 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
#70. Reuss would spend the remainder of his meteoric life on the move, living out of a backpack on very little money, sleeping in the dirt, cheerfully going hungry for days at a time.
Jon Krakauer
#71. The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.
Jon Krakauer
#72. 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
#73. In the adversarial system, it's more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.
Jon Krakauer
#74. 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
#75. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#76. 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
#77. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#78. The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and
Jon Krakauer
#79. There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.
Jon Krakauer
#80. Maybe, I think, I don't have to be great at this; maybe I just have to be good enough.
Jon Krakauer
#82. 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
#83. There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.
Jon Krakauer
#84. I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here ... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness ... give me truth.
Jon Krakauer
#85. Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.
Jon Krakauer
#86. If you get killed," she argued with a mix of despair and anger, "it's not just you who'll pay the price. I'll have to pay, too, you know, for the rest of my life. Doesn't that matter to you?
Jon Krakauer
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind. Thomas F. Hornbein
Jon Krakauer
#90. The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.
Jon Krakauer
#91. 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
#92. Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It's like going to the moon.
Jon Krakauer
#93. Common sense is no match for the voice of God.
Jon Krakauer
#94. 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
#95. The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.
Jon Krakauer
#96. 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..
Jon Krakauer
#97. You get a compound fracture in Colorado where I live, and you can probably be in a hospital within a matter of hours, certainly within a day.
Jon Krakauer
#98. how the powers of government were being improperly used through improper warrants of arrest - how it was unconstitutional to stop a person on the freeway and arrest them.
Jon Krakauer
#99. He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.
Jon Krakauer
#100. I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues ... problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.
Jon Krakauer
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
