HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.

There is the knot of the dilemma that every climber on Everest ends up facing: to be successful, you need to be highly motivated, but if the motivation is excessive, you are likely to die.

When I write books, I've learned not to have any expectations that I'm going to change the world.

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.

I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.

Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones. -John Gill.

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.

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.

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.

Launching a nice little war to divert national attention was a gambit no less appealing to nineteenth-century politicians than it is to their present-day counterparts.

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.

I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last -- overpowering, overwhelming, he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.

Everett Ruess.

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.

A lot of us are like that--I'm like that, Ed Abbey was like that, and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.

The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

Books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

Sometimes my need to love hurts -- myself, my family, my cause. Is there a cure? Of course. But I refuse. Refuse to stop loving, to stop caring. To avoid those tears, that pain...To err on the side of passion is human and right and the only way I'll live.

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.

Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.