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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.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Fear
Recycling
Persons
Reconcile
Person
Deception
Might
Followed
Self
Void
Rationalizations
Endless
Litany
Soon
Deceptions
Struggle
Agonizing

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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.
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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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Sometimes my need to love hurts-- myself, my family, my cause. Is there a cure? Of course. But I refuse. Refuse to stop loving, to stop caring. To avoid those tears, that pain...To err on the side of passion is human and right and the only way I'll live.
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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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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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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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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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You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.
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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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There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.
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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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To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily.
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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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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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Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
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Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that care nothing for hope or longing.
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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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When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
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Short form media is reductionist by nature.
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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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