Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.

Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies.

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

I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.

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.

I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.

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