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.
If you get killed, she argued with a mix of despair and anger, it’s not just you who’ll pay the price. I’ll have to pay, too, you know, for the rest of my life. Doesn’t that matter to you?
I'm a bear technician, so I know what bear damage looks like.
I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.
I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more richly and intensely.
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
Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.
Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s The Kreu...
Books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
Chris answered that careers were demeaning twentieth-century inventions, more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.
To explore the inner country of his own soul.
He found himself woefully unprepared for the flat pitch of life out of uniform. I discovered that I couldn’t really speak to civilians, he continued. My marriage fell apart. All I could see was this l...
A challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn’t a challenge at all.
You hear that rape victims avoid sex afterwards. But it’s actually just as common for some victims to become promiscuous in self-destructive ways.
When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.
When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were precisely what he was se...
When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded hi...
Westerberg’s latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis of the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt’s ne...
We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them -- that we shouldn't go through life relying on others when we had all...
Thoreau’s declaration in Civil Disobedience: I heartily accept the motto—‘That government is best which governs least.