Heaven, for me, is one focused project – it’s like a weird form of autism.
If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It’s mostly about random pointless death and misery.
When I start any book, I have no idea what I’m going to do.
If you’re not a feminist, you’re part of the problem.
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.
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.
Common sense is no match for the voice of God.
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...
It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.
The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.
I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.
Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
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...
The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.
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...
Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.