It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.

What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?

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

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.

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

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.

When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.