HAPPINESS is ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED

I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.

Hours slide by like minutes. 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.

The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.

Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.

When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines through you.