Top 200 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Simply by recounting their stories and breaking that silence, survivors of sexual assault strike a powerful blow against their assailants.”

— Jon Krakauer

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “Because it is there.”

— Jon Krakauer

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

171. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “God, I’m tired.”

— Jon Krakauer

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “And now it was time to commence the dreaded ritual of emerging from the warmth of my goose-down cocoon into the withering cold of 21,300 feet.”

— Jon Krakauer

185. “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

186. “As I fought to catch my breath after moving past three climbers, the mask actually gave the illusion of asphyxiating me, so I tore it from my face – only to discover breathing was even harder without it.”

— Jon Krakauer

187. “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

188. “Shining my headlamp on a dime-store thermometer clipped to the parka I’d been using as a pillow, I saw that the temperature inside the cramped two-person tent was seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit.”

— Jon Krakauer

189. “It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren’t real – as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here.”

— Jon Krakauer

190. “The money itself didn’t seem terribly important to Fischer. He cared little for material things but he hungered for respect and he was acutely aware that in the culture in which he lived, money was the prevailing gauge of success.”

— Jon Krakauer

191. “People of a certain age remember vividly to this day the moment when, as they waited on a drizzly June morning for the Coronation procession to pass by in London, they heard the magical news that the summit of the world was, so to speak, theirs.”

— Jon Krakauer

192. “The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities.”

— Jon Krakauer

193. “The conversation that ensued was anguished and halting. We avoided making eye contact. After five minutes, however, all four of us concurred: Hutchison’s decision to leave Beck and Yasuko where they lay was the proper course of action.”

— Jon Krakauer

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “By any measure this is a lot of money – it equals the mortgage on my Seattle home.”

— Jon Krakauer

198. “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

199. “Following Sikhdar’s discovery in 1852, it would require the lives of twenty-four men, the efforts of fifteen expeditions, and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be attained.”

— Jon Krakauer

200. “Whatever motivated him, Lopsang’s decision to tow a client didn’t seem like a particularly serious mistake at the time. But it would end up being one of many little things – a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.”

— Jon Krakauer