Jon Krakauer Quotes

The mission of professional mountain climbers is almost impossibly difficult by design: Their very livelihood is based on achieving the unprecedented. Their expeditions are complicated, exhausting, often life-threatening. Risk is the fuel that keeps them going.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

Not many know that I'm a mountaineer, and my love for adventure will never die.

For me, climbing has always been about adventure and that involves difficulties, danger and exposure, so I deliberately set out to climb with as little equipment as possible.

Because it is there [famous explanation for wanting to climb Mount Everest].

And for me, the real world involves everything: risk, danger, beauty, energy, all we meet with in the real world.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn't the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I've been called a great adventurer.

Mountaineering is one of the most difficult sports - we are away from routine life for days, living in tents, and it requires high degree of physical and mental strength.

My Antarctic expedition is just about doable, just feasible and that's what is exciting to me. If I knew it was possible, if I knew I could do it without too much bother, I wouldn't be interested.

The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.

I was scared many times on Everest, but this is all part of the challenge. When I fell down a crevasse, it was pretty scary.

There are three elements of mountaineering - difficulty, danger, and exposure. Difficulty is the technical aspect of it. Danger, it is best to avoid, but some people like to increase danger to a point where their success is dependent only on luck. And exposure, which is what truly defines Alpinism, is what you face in wild nature.

It's like a living process. You start out, and you see the Eiger north face, and you think, 'That's impossible.' Then you start to dream. Then you climb the Eiger north face. Then maybe you go to the Himalaya.

When I took on Everest, I'm not there for the views.

Mountains are not fair or unfair - they are dangerous.

I came to Flatanger with a plan in my mind to bolt a really, really hard thing that would be beautiful and keep me motivated to try it for a long time, in some underdeveloped area.

I don't need to come back to Everest.

Adventure is nothing but a romantic name for trouble.

Danger is to adventure what garlic is to spaghetti sauce. Without it, you just end up with stewed tomatoes.

We look up. For weeks, for months, that is all we have done. Look up. And there it is-the top of Everest. Only it is different now: so near, so close, only a little more than a thousand feet above us. It is no longer just a dream, a high dream in the sky, but a real and solid thing, a thing of rock and snow, that men can climb. We make ready. We will climb it. This time, with God's help, we will climb on to the end.

What is life, but one long risk?

There is such a gauntlet of risk that you go through when you climb up to Everest.

There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.

There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that.