Top 250 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

— Jon Krakauer

52. “Short form media is reductionist by nature.”

— Jon Krakauer

53. “Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Such ertramp, master of his own destiny.”

— Jon Krakauer

54. “Heaven, for me, is one focused project – it’s like a weird form of autism.”

— Jon Krakauer

55. “Most climbers aren’t in fact deranged, they’re just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.”

— Jon Krakauer

56. “As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.”

— Jon Krakauer

57. “I love being outdoors, being in the mountains and the desert, and my wife enjoys that too. That’s one of the things that sustain our relationship.”

— Jon Krakauer

58. “When I start any book, I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

— Jon Krakauer

59. “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX.”

— Jon Krakauer

60. “War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians.”

— Jon Krakauer

61. “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, – that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They.”

— Jon Krakauer

62. “I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for ones neighbor – such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps – what more can the heart of a man desire?”

— Jon Krakauer

63. “Westerberg’s latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis of the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt’s need to exert control and Chris’s extravagantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable.”

— Jon Krakauer

64. “But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.”

— Jon Krakauer

65. “Narcissists erupt with self-righteous indignation whenever they believe others are breaking rules, acting unfairly, or getting more than their fair share of the pie. They have no compunction about breaking the rules themselves, however, because they know they’re special and the rules don’t apply to them.”

— Jon Krakauer

66. “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

67. “In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team. The consequences of a poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged rock, or some other careless deed are as likely to be felt by the perpetrator’s colleagues as the perpetrator. Hence it’s not surprising that climbers are typically wary of joining forces with those whose bona fides are unknown to them. But.”

— Jon Krakauer

68. “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

69. “Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

— Jon Krakauer

70. “To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.”

— Jon Krakauer

71. “There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It’s mostly about random pointless death and misery.”

— Jon Krakauer

72. “Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

— Jon Krakauer

73. “By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything – the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds – to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.”

— Jon Krakauer

74. “Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war.”

— Jon Krakauer

75. “The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.”

— Jon Krakauer

76. “If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”

— Jon Krakauer

77. “In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you.”

— Jon Krakauer

78. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”

— Jon Krakauer

79. “Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It’s like going to the moon.”

— Jon Krakauer

80. “I don’t think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing a few screws.”

— Jon Krakauer

81. “This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die.”

— Jon Krakauer

82. “Every minute you remain at this altitude and above,” he cautioned, “your minds and bodies are deteriorating.” Brain cells were dying. Our blood was growing dangerously thick and sludgelike.”

— Jon Krakauer

83. “He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”

— Jon Krakauer

84. “I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me. I saw that I had been selfish and unbending and a giant pain in the ass. He’d built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage.”

— Jon Krakauer

85. “I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more richly and intensely.”

— Jon Krakauer

86. “You’ll never feel the joy of movement if you’re struggling. You’ve got to get good enough and strong enough to reach the point where you can feel this quintessential lightness. – John Gill.”

— Jon Krakauer

87. “The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.”

— Jon Krakauer

88. “Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.”

— Jon Krakauer

89. “And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.”

— Jon Krakauer

90. “He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon.”

— Jon Krakauer

91. “There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act – a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.”

— Jon Krakauer

92. “And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.”

— Jon Krakauer

93. “When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.”

— Jon Krakauer

94. “You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.”

— Jon Krakauer

95. “He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”

— Jon Krakauer

96. “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

97. “I’m going to repeat that: Without the support of our Sherpas none of us has any chance of climbing the mountain.”

— Jon Krakauer

98. “There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.”

— Jon Krakauer

99. “From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life’s one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.”

— Jon Krakauer

100. “I don’t know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”

— Jon Krakauer