Top 250 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.”

— Jon Krakauer

102. “At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard.”

— Jon Krakauer

103. “For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. G. K. CHESTERTON.”

— Jon Krakauer

104. “The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive.”

— Jon Krakauer

105. “I didn’t doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues... problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.”

— Jon Krakauer

106. “Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.”

— Jon Krakauer

107. “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.”

— Jon Krakauer

108. “By design McCandless came into the country with insufficient provisions, and he lacked certain pieces of equipment deemed essential by many Alaskans: a large-caliber rifle, map and compass, an ax. This has been regarded as evidence not just of stupidity but of the even greater sin of arrogance.”

— Jon Krakauer

109. “Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”

— Jon Krakauer

110. “My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.”

— Jon Krakauer

111. “I have some good friends here, but no one really understands why I am here or what I do. I don’t know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone.”

— Jon Krakauer

112. “For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.”

— Jon Krakauer

113. “He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. 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

114. “Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it.”

— Jon Krakauer

115. “At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder...”

— Jon Krakauer

116. “All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.”

— Jon Krakauer

117. “I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me.”

— Jon Krakauer

118. “Solitude was a rare commodity on Everest, and I was grateful to be granted a bit of it on this day, in such a remarkable setting.”

— Jon Krakauer

119. “The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society – a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.”

— Jon Krakauer

120. “Military investigations are designed not to find anyone guilty.”

— Jon Krakauer

121. “Much of the food he put on the table came from hunting – despite the fact that he was uncomfortable killing animals. “My dad cried every time he shot a deer,” Billie says, ’but we had to eat, so he did it.”

— Jon Krakauer

122. “Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!”

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

124. “There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. 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

125. “His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.”

— Jon Krakauer

126. “He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.”

— Jon Krakauer

127. “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

128. “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... I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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. And I lived to tell my tale.”

— Jon Krakauer

129. “In Missoula, Grizzly football exists in a realm apart, where there is a pervasive sense of entitlement. University of Montana fans, coaches, players, and their lawyers expect, and often receive, special dispensation.”

— Jon Krakauer

130. “I mean, 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

131. “In the adversarial system, it’s more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.”

— Jon Krakauer

132. “He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.”

— Jon Krakauer

133. “Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from the tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.”

— Jon Krakauer

134. “It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.”

— Jon Krakauer

135. “Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams,” he penned to a girl named Vanessa. “Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming.” Doug.”

— Jon Krakauer

136. “On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother’s house.”

— Jon Krakauer

137. “Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort.”

— Jon Krakauer

138. “A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence – the lapses of consciousness, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes – all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”

— Jon Krakauer

139. “I grew up with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier.”

— Jon Krakauer

140. “We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality.”

— Jon Krakauer

141. “The courtroom oath – “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” – is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t take this oath – they couldn’t! Indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on the foundation of not telling the whole truth. It is the job of the defense attorney – especially when representing the guilty – to prevent, by all lawful means, the “whole truth” from coming out.”

— Jon Krakauer

142. “He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...”

— Jon Krakauer

143. “Devout Buddhists believe in sonam – an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.”

— Jon Krakauer

144. “While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear.”

— Jon Krakauer

145. “When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.”

— Jon Krakauer

146. “I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.”

— Jon Krakauer

147. “Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions.”

— Jon Krakauer

148. “Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.”

— Jon Krakauer

149. “But then I’m not easily shocked. I’ve had several friends who drowned or got murdered or died in weird accidents. In Alaska you get used to strange stuff happening.”

— Jon Krakauer

150. “But it also demonstrates how difficult it is to correct a false belief after people have made an emotional investment in that belief being true. When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.”

— Jon Krakauer