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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

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Important
Earned
Boldest
Much
Equipment
Unforgiving
Considered
Mountain
Imaginable
Style
Tackling
Getting
Minimal
Less
Prestige
Given
Routes

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I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
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Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.
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I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
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When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
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HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED
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To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily.
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You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
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Short form media is reductionist by nature.
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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.
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...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
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There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.
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I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
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It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.
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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.
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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.
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What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
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When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines through you.
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The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
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