You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.

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.

This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

I love being outdoors, being in the mountains and the desert, and my wife enjoys that too. That's one of the things that sustain our relationship.

At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

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

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.