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weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Taking
Huge
Sense
Betraying
Mind
Irreparable
Weeping
Betray
Measure
Loss

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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 want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
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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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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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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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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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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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Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from the tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.
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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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Short form media is reductionist by nature.
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Heaven, for me, is one focused project - it's like a weird form of autism.
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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 trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
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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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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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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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What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
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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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It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.
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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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