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Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Seekers
Publicity
Hopeless
Kooks
Hold
Romantics
Others
Shaky
Reality
Everest
Always
Magnet

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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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Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
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That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.
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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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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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Its not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.
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HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED
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Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.
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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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Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
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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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You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
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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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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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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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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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The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are.
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The thing that is most beautiful about Antarctica for me is the light. It's like no other light on Earth, because the air is so free of impurities. You get drugged by it, like when you listen to one of your favorite songs. The light there is a mood-enhancing substance.
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Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
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