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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
True
Contain
Enough
Surrounded
Mean
Miss
Much
Intelligent
Things
Missing
Learned
Share
Beauty
Companionship

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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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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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It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
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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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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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But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
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That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.
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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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Heaven, for me, is one focused project - it's like a weird form of autism.
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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 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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You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
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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 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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