But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

Its not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.

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.

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

As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.

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

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.