Top 250 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Happiness is only real when shared.”

— Jon Krakauer

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

2. “I now walk into the wild.”

— Jon Krakauer

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Nature Quotes, Adventure Quotes

3. “It’s not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.”

— Jon Krakauer

4. “When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.”

— Jon Krakauer

Featured in: Moving On Quotes, Forgiving Quotes

5. “Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.”

— Jon Krakauer

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Adventure Quotes

6. “Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don’t want one.”

— Jon Krakauer

Featured in: Inspirational Career Quotes

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Jon Krakauer

9. “What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”

— Jon Krakauer

10. “But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”

— Jon Krakauer

11. “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

12. “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

13. “That’s what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.”

— Jon Krakauer

14. “Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.”

— Jon Krakauer

15. “Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don’t want one. You don’t need to worry about me; I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I’m living like this by choice.”

— Jon Krakauer

16. “Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.”

— Jon Krakauer

17. “If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.”

— Jon Krakauer

18. “The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”

— Jon Krakauer

19. “At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”

— Jon Krakauer

20. “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

21. “I thought climbing the Devil’s Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

— Jon Krakauer

22. “In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team.”

— Jon Krakauer

23. “Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that care nothing for hope or longing.”

— Jon Krakauer

24. “You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.”

— Jon Krakauer

25. “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

26. “I think part of the appeal of Antarctica is experiencing some sort of power, the forces of the natural world.”

— Jon Krakauer

27. “If you’re not a feminist, you’re part of the problem.”

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Jon Krakauer

31. “But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn’t summon the energy to care.”

— Jon Krakauer

32. “I never studied writing, but I’d always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.”

— Jon Krakauer

33. “Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.”

— Jon Krakauer

34. “Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.”

— Jon Krakauer

35. “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

36. “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

37. “Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.”

— Jon Krakauer

38. “Antarctica is a very alien environment, and you can’t survive here more than minutes if you’re not equipped properly and doing the right thing all the time.”

— Jon Krakauer

39. “The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are...”

— Jon Krakauer

40. “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

41. “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

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Jon Krakauer

44. “Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.”

— Jon Krakauer

45. “He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”

— Jon Krakauer

46. “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

47. “You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. You.”

— Jon Krakauer

48. “I’m intrigued by fanatics – people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.”

— Jon Krakauer

49. “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

50. “Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”

— Jon Krakauer