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It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Mean
Miss
Much
Intelligent
Things
Missing
Learned
Share
Beauty
Companionship
True
Contain
Enough
Surrounded

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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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...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
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Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.
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That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.
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Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
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But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
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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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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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I mean, how can you not be a feminist if you have a brain in your head? If you’re not a feminist, then you’re a problem.
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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'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
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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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What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
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When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
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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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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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Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
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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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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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Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
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