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. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
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. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
How can you not be a feminist if you have a brain in your head? If you’re not a feminist, then you’re a problem. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
When I write books, I’ve learned not to have any expectations that I’m going to change the world. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
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. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
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. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
There’s something about being afraid, about being small, about enforced humility that draws me to climbing. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
Almost every magazine piece I’ve ever written, I felt like I haven’t done it justice, like it was just a gloss. Jon Krakauer Read Quote
I never studied writing, but I’d always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer. Jon Krakauer Read Quote