But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a “slag heap” – a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a “serious” climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world’s highest mountain.

— Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer Quotes

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from The inhospitable board. the hospitality was a cold as the ices.

— Jon Krakauer

There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

— Jon Krakauer

It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren’t real – as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here.

— Jon Krakauer

Although I’d ascended hundreds of mountains, Everest was so different from anything I’d previously climbed that my powers of imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon.

— Jon Krakauer

McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.

— Jon Krakauer

It’s the police, for the most part, who decide whether a suspect should be arrested, and prosecutors who ultimately determine whether a conviction should be pursued.

— Jon Krakauer

We understand that honor, truth and hard work win in the end. We are Montana.

— Jon Krakauer

Whatever motivated him, Lopsang’s decision to tow a client didn’t seem like a particularly serious mistake at the time. But it would end up being one of many little things – a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.

— Jon Krakauer

Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams,” he penned to a girl named Vanessa. “Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming.” Doug.

— Jon Krakauer

Police and prosecutors are morally and professionally obligated to make every effort to identify specious rape reports, safeguard the civil rights of rape suspects, and prevent the falsely accused from being convicted. At the same time, however, police and prosecutors are obligated to do everything in their power to identify individuals who have committed rape and ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. These two objectives are not mutually exclusive.

— Jon Krakauer

Rape victims provide police with more information – and better information – when detectives interview them from a position of trust rather than one of suspicion.

— Jon Krakauer

Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our midst.

— Jon Krakauer

He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times he knew nobody would be around.

— Jon Krakauer

I’m a bear technician, so I know what bear damage looks like.

— Jon Krakauer

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. At such moments something resembling happiness.

— Jon Krakauer

The conversation that ensued was anguished and halting. We avoided making eye contact. After five minutes, however, all four of us concurred: Hutchison’s decision to leave Beck and Yasuko where they lay was the proper course of action.

— Jon Krakauer

Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772–1869 by Michael S. Durham.

— Jon Krakauer

My father was a volatile, extremely complicated person, possessed of a brash demeanor that masked deep insecurities.

— Jon Krakauer

Following Sikhdar’s discovery in 1852, it would require the lives of twenty-four men, the efforts of fifteen expeditions, and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be attained.

— Jon Krakauer

Not only during the ascent but also during the descent my will-power is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing – and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is – like death through freezing – a pleasant one. Reinhold Messner The Crystal Horizon.

— Jon Krakauer
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