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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
Nothing
Course
Climbing
Make
Almost
Mountains
Would
Came
Mountain
Life
Wrong
Appreciate
Poor
Devil
Receptacles
Dream
Dreams
Thumb
Ends
Changed
Thumbs
Thought
Courses
Climbs

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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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You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
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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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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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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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If you don't take it, I'm going to throw it away, Alex cheerfully retorted. I don't want to know what time it is. I don't want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.
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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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weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.
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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.
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