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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.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Existence
Lays
Came
Contrary
Purpose
Easily
Values
Meaning
Things
Value
Distrusted
Life
Comfortable
Hummed
Beyond
Path
Wrested

More quotes by Jon Krakauer

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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.
Jon Krakauer
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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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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 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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Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.
Jon Krakauer
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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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Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
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I love being outdoors, being in the mountains and the desert, and my wife enjoys that too. That's one of the things that sustain our relationship.
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I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.
Jon Krakauer
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When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
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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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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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But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.
Jon Krakauer
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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.
Jon Krakauer
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But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
Jon Krakauer
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Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.
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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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I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
Jon Krakauer
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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.
Jon Krakauer
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What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
Jon Krakauer