When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.

weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.

It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.

At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts.

Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.