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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.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Trying
Function
Accurately
Case
Idealism
Cases
Stubborn
Wasn
Flaws
Virtue
Afghanistan
Ends
Tragic
Right
Mets
Flaw
Thing
Brought
Insistence

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Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
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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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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.
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But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.
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That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.
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The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
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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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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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I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
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At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts.
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Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendship, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limit.... A passion for life is contagious and uplifting. Passion cuts both ways.... Those that make you feel on top of the world are equally able to turnit upside down.
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But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.
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HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED
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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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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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What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
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As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.
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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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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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