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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.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Make
Almost
Mountains
Would
Came
Mountain
Life
Wrong
Appreciate
Poor
Devil
Receptacles
Dream
Dreams
Thumb
Ends
Changed
Thumbs
Thought
Courses
Climbs
Nothing
Course
Climbing

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If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
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Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.
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Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
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Heaven, for me, is one focused project - it's like a weird form of autism.
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weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.
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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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Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
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Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies.
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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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You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
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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.
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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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