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If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Blank
Gotta
Spots
Behinds
Behind
Leave
Maps
Spot

More quotes by Jon Krakauer

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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.
Jon Krakauer
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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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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.
Jon Krakauer
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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.
Jon Krakauer
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...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
Jon Krakauer
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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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I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
Jon Krakauer
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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.
Jon Krakauer
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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.
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
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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.
Jon Krakauer
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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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But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
Jon Krakauer
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I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
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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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.
Jon Krakauer
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HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED
Jon Krakauer
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When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
Jon Krakauer
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Heaven, for me, is one focused project - it's like a weird form of autism.
Jon Krakauer
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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.
Jon Krakauer