Top 250 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “President George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil.”

— Jon Krakauer

205. “As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.”

— Jon Krakauer

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Organized religion is hate masquerading as love.”

— Jon Krakauer

209. “With so many incompetent people on the mountain,” Rob said with a frown one evening in late April, “I think it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll get through this season without something bad happening up high.”

— Jon Krakauer

210. “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

211. “And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God – as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.”

— Jon Krakauer

212. “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy.”

— Jon Krakauer

213. “Surprisingly, once she started working with professional counselors and advocates, Natasha’s opinion about the desirability of reporting rapes to the police changed. Her colleagues pointed out that for some victims of sexual assault, engaging with the criminal justice system could traumatize them severely all over again, so the staff at SFTS didn’t necessarily recommend it. Her colleagues definitely urged every victim to get counseling, however.”

— Jon Krakauer

214. “McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.”

— Jon Krakauer

215. “For Satan was the founder of this black race, for he came to Cain after God had taken away his power to procreate the children of righteousness, and showed him how he could place his seed into animals, and the seed of animals into other animals, for he did corrupt the seed of the earth in this manner, hoping to thwart the works of God.”

— Jon Krakauer

216. “As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. 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

217. “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

218. “No Man Knows My History, her magnificent, contentious biography of Joseph.”

— Jon Krakauer

219. “I’m a bear technician, so I know what bear damage looks like.”

— Jon Krakauer

220. “Even individuals we admire can have skeletons in their closet.”

— Jon Krakauer

221. “All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith.”

— Jon Krakauer

222. “We understand that honor, truth and hard work win in the end. We are Montana.”

— Jon Krakauer

223. “Boredom presents a very real, if insidious, peril.”

— Jon Krakauer

224. “Joseph wasn’t by nature reflective or deliberative. He conducted his life impulsively, acting according to instinct and emotion. The Lord, it seemed to him, must surely have intended man to know the love of more than one wife or He wouldn’t have made the prospect so enticing.”

— Jon Krakauer

225. “The impetus for most fundamentalist movements – whether Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, or Jewish – is a yearning to return to the mythical order and perfection of the original church.”

— Jon Krakauer

226. “The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith – still the religion’s focal personage – married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.”

— Jon Krakauer

227. “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. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: 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

228. “The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power.”

— Jon Krakauer

229. “There was too much of the Puritan in him, and he could not rest until he had redefined the nature of sin and erected a stupendous theological edifice to support his new theories on marriage.”

— Jon Krakauer

230. “Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.”

— Jon Krakauer

231. “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. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.”

— Jon Krakauer

232. “According to many peer-reviewed studies, a large percentage of the victims of non-stranger rapes “actually feared they were going to be killed,” even when “there was no weapon and no overt violence.” Thompson.”

— Jon Krakauer

233. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

235. “His denials had always gotten him off the hook before, but his repeated success at wiggling out of tight situations incubated a dangerous hubris, which in turn increased his sexual recklessness.”

— Jon Krakauer

236. “No Western nation is as religion-soaked as ours, where nine out of ten of us love God and are loved by him in return. That mutual passion centers our society and demands some understanding, if our doom-eager society is to be understood at all.”

— Jon Krakauer

237. “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

238. “Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.”

— Jon Krakauer

239. “The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” “The Wit of Porportuk.”

— Jon Krakauer

240. “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

241. “In the morning he called together five trusted Mormon leaders and, “with broken spirit,” informed them that God had revealed to him the necessity of relinquishing “the practice of that principle for which the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives.” To the shock and utter horror of the other men in the room, President Woodruff explained that “it was the will of the Lord” that the church stop sanctioning the doctrine of plural marriage.”

— Jon Krakauer

242. “They castrated him, cut his throat, sliced off one of his ears, and shot him two or three times.”

— Jon Krakauer

243. “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

244. “Anything that gets you out, that gets you physically active, is going to be good psychotherapy and stave off winter problems.”

— Jon Krakauer

245. “Uncle Rulon has married an estimated seventy-five women with whom he has fathered at least sixty-five children; several of his wives were given to him in marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties.”

— Jon Krakauer

246. “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

247. “Laughter is always something that is a shared experience.”

— Jon Krakauer

248. “When you forgive, you love.”

— Jon Krakauer

249. “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

250. “These murders are shocking for a host of reasons, but no aspect of the crimes is more disturbing than Lafferty’s complete and determined absence of remorse.”

— Jon Krakauer