Jon Krakauer - Into the Wild (1996)

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A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream.

Jon Krakauer
Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

Jon Krakauer
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
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
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
Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant.

Jon Krakauer
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
When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines upon you.

Jon Krakauer
The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.

Jon Krakauer
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
Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.

Jon Krakauer
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
To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrestled from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things than came easily.

Jon Krakauer
When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.

Jon Krakauer
If you don't take it, I'm going to throw it away," Alex cheerfully retorted. "I don't want to know what time it is. I don't want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.

Jon Krakauer
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.

Jon Krakauer
An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.

Jon Krakauer
You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.

Jon Krakauer
What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?

Jon Krakauer
The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

Jon Krakauer
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.

Jon Krakauer
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
I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.

Jon Krakauer
<...> 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.

Jon Krakauer
Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.

Jon Krakauer
Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.

Jon Krakauer
According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

Jon Krakauer
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
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

Jon Krakauer
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.

Jon Krakauer