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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
37e5db0	With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," Hall observed. "The trick is to get back down alive."			Jon Krakauer
71414c9	Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don't want one. You don't need to worry about me; I have a college education. I'm not destitute. I'm living like this by choice.			Jon Krakauer
a267790	But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.			Jon Krakauer
452bbd5	Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.			Jon Krakauer
fdffc3e	Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.			Jon Krakauer
ea8cf19	But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.		inspirational into-the-wild	Jon Krakauer
0f6f21c	It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering....			Jon Krakauer
8496244	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
ceb8343	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. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of ..			Jon Krakauer
2c0c1bf	Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. "He'd tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available."			Jon Krakauer
251d3a4	My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards...			Jon Krakauer
7fd7066	The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.			Jon Krakauer
31a4e84	This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.		everest	Jon Krakauer
d9664c6	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..		history life sence	Jon Krakauer
dec382a	We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality			Jon Krakauer
9ccfb6a	And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.... And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."			Jon Krakauer
f940c93	Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like ..			Jon Krakauer
433727c	Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and..			Jon Krakauer
035dea1	If you're bumming out, you're not gonna get to the top, so as long as we're up here we might as well make a point of grooving. (Quoting Scott Fischer)			Jon Krakauer
07a3fee	Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence -- the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes -- all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.			Jon Krakauer
d899309	There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act--a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.			Jon Krakauer
a18e29f	to explore the inner country of his own soul.			Jon Krakauer
496f838	I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of use were probably seeking, above else, something like a state of grace.			Jon Krakauer
0e85d77	For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden..			Jon Krakauer
788f63c	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... I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic.			Jon Krakauer
fdd3279	though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won't be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991 - January 7, 1992. But this is not important. 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.		inspirational	Jon Krakauer
9b71e99	Rape and war, she explained are among the most common causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of sexual assault frequently exhibit many of the same symptoms and behaviors as survivors of combat: flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, depression, isolation, suicidal thoughts, outbursts of anger, unrelenting anxiety, and an inability to shake the feeling that the world is spinning out of control.		rape-culture	Jon Krakauer
21461f8	Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.		faith mormon reason religion	Jon Krakauer
6fce600	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.			Jon Krakauer
1d12802	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
bacd61f	But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.		happy think-for-yourself	Jon Krakauer
ed89433	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.			Jon Krakauer
74159fd	Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol!stoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces "the demands of the flesh." Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless's distinc!tive hand. ..			Jon Krakauer
847fb27	It was actually pretty common for women not to scream or call the cops in rape cases I prosecuted," Roe said, "at least partly because women aren't wired to react that way. We are socialized to be likeable and not to create friction. We are brought up to be nice. Women are supposed to resolve problems without making a scene--to make bad things go away as if they never happened."			Jon Krakauer
6b6b4f6	In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map---not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.		wandering	Jon Krakauer
2d7698c	I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming," he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. "But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life. Everett Ruess"		nomad overwhelmed vagabond vagabond-for-beauty wanderer wilderness	Jon Krakauer
ba3c639	When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex."		inspirational religious	Jon Krakauer
7339014	Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.		into-the-wild supertramp travel travel-writer	Jon Krakauer
fec1d6a	A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris's final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, m..			Jon Krakauer
c9366fe	He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...			Jon Krakauer
b542171	such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God--most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity ..		religion	Jon Krakauer
5dcfea3	In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisti..			Jon Krakauer
be0c072	Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep."		assault assaults behavior catcalling communication culture disrespect feminism gender gender-roles harassment men-and-women men-s-behavior misogynist misogyny not-listening personal-autonomy personal-experience personal-experiences personal-space predators predatory-behavior problems-in-the-world problems-of-today problems-with-men problems-with-society rape rape-culture rapists saying-no sexism sexual-abuse sexual-assault sexual-violence sexuality street-harassment survivors verbal-abuse victims women women-and-men women-s-experiences women-s-issues women-s-rights	Jon Krakauer
7f7c64c	The U.S. legal system is organized as an adversarial contest: in civil cases, between two citizens; in criminal cases, between a citizen and the state. Physical violence and intimidation are not allowed in court, whereas aggressive argument, selective presentation of the facts, and psychological attack are permitted, with the presumption that this ritualized, hostile encounter offers the best method of arriving at the truth. Constitutional ..			Jon Krakauer

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