Words matter. These are the best Jon Krakauer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I went to Everest, I underestimated things. I just didn’t know what altitude could do. Or the cold – I especially didn’t appreciate the cold. It can be just debilitating, and things can happen so quickly.
Heaven, for me, is one focused project – it’s like a weird form of autism.
What makes climbing great for me, strangely enough, is this life-and-death aspect. It sounds trite to say, I know, but climbing isn’t just another game. It isn’t just another sport. It’s life itself. Which is what makes it so compelling and also what makes it so impossible to justify when things go bad.
Why climb? That’s a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I really asked that a lot on Everest. I can’t justify it. I can’t say it’s for a good cause. All I can say is look at the history of exploration: it’s full of vainglorious pursuits.
Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It’s like going to the moon.
I never studied writing, but I’d always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
The way to Everest is not a Yellow Brick Road.
I’m not even religious, but I get fanaticism. I get the appeal of it.
You can get a lawyer with two months off or a New York socialite who wants to play at being Lewis and Clark and put them up there, but Everest is still in charge; it can still kick butt.
I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs, but one of my favorites was working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. What I loved about it was, you got paid for what you caught.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It’s mostly about random pointless death and misery.
Climbing Mount Everest was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I wish I’d never gone. I suffered for years of PTSD and still suffer from what happened. I’m glad I wrote a book about it. But, you know, if I could go back and relive my life, I would never have climbed Everest.
When I was 23, I went to Alaska by myself into the glaciers of the coast range and climbed a mountain by myself. It was incredibly reckless, incredibly stupid. But I was lucky. And I survived, and I came back to tell my story.
I knew that you couldn’t make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.
Antarctica is a very alien environment, and you can’t survive here more than minutes if you’re not equipped properly and doing the right thing all the time.
I’m intrigued by fanatics – people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
The thing that is most beautiful about Antarctica for me is the light. It’s like no other light on Earth, because the air is so free of impurities. You get drugged by it, like when you listen to one of your favorite songs. The light there is a mood-enhancing substance.
Everest is not real climbing. It’s rich people climbing. It’s a trophy on the wall, and they’re done… When I say I wish I’d never gone, I really mean that.
Rob Hall was, without doubt, the most competent guide in mountaineering.
I guess I don’t try to justify climbing or defend it, because I can’t. I see climbing as a compulsion that, at its best, is no worse than many other compulsions – golf or stamp collecting or growing world-record pumpkins.
You get a compound fracture in Colorado where I live, and you can probably be in a hospital within a matter of hours, certainly within a day.
As I point out in the very first pages of ‘Into the Wild,’ I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist.
When I write books, I’ve learned not to have any expectations that I’m going to change the world.
The way Everest is guided is very different from the way other mountains are guided, and it flies in the face of values I hold dear: self-reliance, taking responsibility for what you do, making your own decisions, trusting your judgment – the kind of judgment that comes only through paying your dues, through experience.
When I start any book, I have no idea what I’m going to do.
