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

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

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.

The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism - his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.