Top 250 Jon Krakauer Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence – the lapses of conscience, 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. At such moments something resembling happiness.”

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

207. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Fundamentalists call defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and regard it as a virtuous act.”

— Jon Krakauer

214. “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

215. “But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions.”

— Jon Krakauer

216. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

218. “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

219. “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

220. “Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772–1869 by Michael S. Durham.”

— Jon Krakauer

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “Joseph was murdered in Illinois by a mob of Mormon haters in 1844. Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and led the Saints to the barren wilds of the Great Basin, where in short order they established a remarkable empire and unabashedly embraced the covenant of “spiritual wifery.” This both titillated and shocked the sensibilities of Victorian-era Americans, who tended to regard polygamy as a brutish practice on a par with slavery.”

— Jon Krakauer

229. “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

230. “Like being free to think for yourself.”

— Jon Krakauer

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

240. “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

241. “It’s the police, for the most part, who decide whether a suspect should be arrested, and prosecutors who ultimately determine whether a conviction should be pursued.”

— Jon Krakauer

242. “All told, thirty-four climbers departed for the summit in the middle of that night. Although we left the Col as members of three distinct expeditions, our fates were already starting to intertwine – and they would become more and more tightly bound with every meter we ascended.”

— Jon Krakauer

243. “A large man, he cheerfully refers to the prison’s maximum-security unit as “my monastery.”

— Jon Krakauer

244. “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

245. “I didn’t recognize that at the time, of course, but I’m grateful for it now.”

— Jon Krakauer

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

— Jon Krakauer

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “You’ll never feel the joy of movement if you’re struggling.”

— Jon Krakauer