Top 250 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “My life was falling apart. But somehow I stuck it out.”

— Jon Krakauer

154. “I have to admit, the terrorists were following their prophet,” Dan says. “They were willing to do essentially what I did. I see the parallel. But the difference between those guys and me is, they were following a false prophet, and I’m not. “I believe I’m a good person,” Dan insists. “I’ve never done anything intentionally wrong. I never have.”

— Jon Krakauer

155. “Missoula has a culture uniquely its own, however, thanks to the fusion of its gritty frontier heritage with the university’s myriad impacts. UM has nationally distinguished programs in biology and ecology and is perhaps even more renowned for its literary bona fides. The faculty of the university’s Creative Writing Program, founded in 1920, has included such influential authors as Richard Hugo, James Crumley, and William Kittredge.”

— Jon Krakauer

156. “Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it – mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn’t, of course.”

— Jon Krakauer

157. “Neither Emma’s tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.”

— Jon Krakauer

158. “The urge to catalog the myriad blunders in order to “learn from the mistakes” is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception.”

— Jon Krakauer

159. “Using his gift for fundamentalist rhetoric and adroitly manipulating the religious indoctrination Elizabeth had received since she was old enough to talk, Mitchell cowed the girl into becoming an utterly submissive polygamous concubine – buttressing his powers of theological persuasion with threats to kill her and her family.”

— Jon Krakauer

160. “How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?”

— Jon Krakauer

161. “My ignorance was inexcusable, and it made me ashamed.”

— Jon Krakauer

162. “According to Montana law, Keteyian countered, a person who is physically incapacitated is incapable of providing consent. Given her extremely high blood alcohol level, he wondered, wasn’t Belnap clearly incapacitated?”

— Jon Krakauer

163. “In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that’s irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.”

— Jon Krakauer

164. “He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic.”

— Jon Krakauer

165. “And because he happened to be the father of Debbie’s own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.”

— Jon Krakauer

166. “It is not uncommon for doctors to be chronic overachievers; Beck wasn’t the first physician to go overboard with a new hobby. But.”

— Jon Krakauer

167. “Because it is there.”

— Jon Krakauer

168. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from The inhospitable board. the hospitality was a cold as the ices.”

— Jon Krakauer

169. “Between 1840 and 1844 God instructed the prophet to marry some forty women.”

— Jon Krakauer

170. “The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and it is currently the largest employer in the state of Utah.”

— Jon Krakauer

171. “Launching into a long story involving a French tourist, a Buddhist monk, and a particularly shaggy yak, Hall delivered the punch line with an impish squint, paused a beat for effect, then threw his head back in a booming, contagious laugh, unable to contain his delight in his own yarn. I liked him immediately.”

— Jon Krakauer

172. “If the expansion of the LDS faith continues at its current pace, within sixty years governing the United States will become “impossible without Mormon cooperation,” according to the eminent scholar Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University – and an unabashed admirer of Joseph Smith and the Mormons.”

— Jon Krakauer

173. “If someone like Pete Schoening was the equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who’d bribed their way into the World Series.”

— Jon Krakauer

174. “Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.”

— Jon Krakauer

175. “And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic.”

— Jon Krakauer

176. “Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.”

— Jon Krakauer

177. “Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our midst.”

— Jon Krakauer

178. “The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and.”

— Jon Krakauer

179. “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

— Jon Krakauer

180. “No more than 20 percent of rapes are reported to the police, a statistic that defies comprehension until one looks closely at how sexual-assault cases are adjudicated in the United States.”

— Jon Krakauer

181. “My father was a volatile, extremely complicated person, possessed of a brash demeanor that masked deep insecurities.”

— Jon Krakauer

182. “Maybe, I think, I don’t have to be great at this; maybe I just have to be good enough.”

— Jon Krakauer

183. “As I write these words, half a year has passed since I returned from Nepal, and on any given day during those six months, no more than two or three hours have gone by in which Everest hasn’t monopolized my thoughts. Not even in sleep is there respite: imagery from the climb and its aftermath continues to permeate my dreams.”

— Jon Krakauer

184. “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. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.”

— Jon Krakauer

185. “Before signing off, Hall told his wife, “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” These would be the last words anyone would hear him speak. Attempts to make radio contact with Hall later that night and the next day went unanswered.”

— Jon Krakauer

186. “But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have.”

— Jon Krakauer

187. “Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma 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

188. “There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.”

— Jon Krakauer

189. “Although I’d ascended hundreds of mountains, Everest was so different from anything I’d previously climbed that my powers of imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon.”

— Jon Krakauer

190. “Fifty-four-year-old Tom Green is a fat, bearded man with a receding hairline, thirty-two children, and five wives.”

— Jon Krakauer

191. “March 1996, Outside magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.”

— Jon Krakauer

192. “But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a “slag heap” – a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a “serious” climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world’s highest mountain.”

— Jon Krakauer

193. “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

— Jon Krakauer

194. “He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times he knew nobody would be around.”

— Jon Krakauer

195. “Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner of later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence was inevitable, but when it finally happened the shock was magnified by the sheer superfluity of the carnage.”

— Jon Krakauer

196. “Not only during the ascent but also during the descent my will-power is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing – and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is – like death through freezing – a pleasant one. Reinhold Messner The Crystal Horizon.”

— Jon Krakauer

197. “It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.”

— Jon Krakauer

198. “In the absence of conviction, I’ve come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain – which doesn’t strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.”

— Jon Krakauer

199. “Several were still pubescent girls, such as fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Although she acquiesced when the prophet explained that God had commanded her to become his plural wife – and that she would be permitted twenty-four hours to comply – Helen later confided to a friend, “I was young, and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.”

— Jon Krakauer

200. “And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.”

— Jon Krakauer