I saw the film adapted from the book that's screenplay was written by Sean Penn while the book was written by one of the best writers I have encountered in my life time by the name of Jon Krakauer. His words are timeless and honestly, along the lines of some of the top writers in history. I am going to list as many quotes as possible that I found in the movie that are from his book. I was really moved by the content and by the words or dialogue from this film. They were amazing and there are so many too.
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.
Into the Wild Quotes
“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“It's not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: conformity, life, novelty, security 2104 likes Like
“I now walk into the wild.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1227 likes Like
“I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.
Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: adventure, conformity, joy, life, security 1167 likes Like
“Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: love 1013 likes Like
“When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: forgiveness, love 768 likes Like
“I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 717 likes Like
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: change, complacency, inspirational 613 likes Like
“I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth. ”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 470 likes Like
“We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
399 likes Like
“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 372 likes Like
“The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
327 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: entitlement, inexperience, krakauer, mccandless, naivete, youth 317 likes Like
“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
317 likes Like
“What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: love 303 likes Like
“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: life-and-living 275 likes Like
“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
248 likes Like
“That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
220 likes Like
“Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
178 likes Like
“The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 176 likes Like
“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: free, happy, life, wild 131 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 125 likes Like
“On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's "Family Happiness", having marked several passages that moved him:
"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?" ...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
121 likes Like
“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
100 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
79 likes Like
“According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: challenges, life, success 76 likes Like
“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...I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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. And I lived to tell my tale.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
65 likes Like
“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
65 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
64 likes
“I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: freedom, into-the-wild 48 likes Like
“The fragility of crystal is not a weakness but a fineness. My parents understood that fine crystal glass had to be cared for or may be shattered. But when it came to my brother, they didn’t seem to know or care that their course of their secret action brought the kind of devastation that could cut them. Their fraudulent marriage and our father’s denial of his other son was for Chris a murder of every day’s truth. He felt his whole life turned like a river suddenly reversing the direction of its flow. Suddenly running uphill. These revelations struck at the core of Chris’s sense of identity. They made his entire childhood seem like fiction. Chris never told them he knew and made me promise silence as well.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: alex-supertramp, chris-mccandless, into-the-wild 41 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: adventure, climbing, into-the-wild, krakauer 41 likes Like
“He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
39 likes Like
“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
38 likes Like
“When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex. After I dropped off the hitchhikers," Franz continues," I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn't used to drinking, so it made me real sick. Hoped it'd kill me, but it didn't. Just made me real, real sick.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
38 likes Like
“If you don't take it, I'm going to throw it away," Alex cheerfully retorted. "I don't want to know what time it is. I don't want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
36 likes Like
“Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that care nothing for hope or longing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
29 likes Like
“Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. "He'd tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
27 likes Like
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
27 likes Like
“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. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex.
In my case - and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless - that was a very different thing from wanting to die.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
21 likes Like
“But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: dreams, inspirational, into-the-wild 21 likes Like
“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don't want one. You don’t need to worry about me; I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I'm living like this by choice.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
19 likes Like
“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..”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: death, history, life, sence 18 likes Like
“The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
16 likes Like
“Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
15 likes Like
“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… I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
15 likes Like
“<...> though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won't be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991 - January 7, 1992. But this is not important. 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: enjoy-life, inspirational 14 likes Like
“Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.
McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
10 likes Like
“When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: atheism, inspirational, religious 10 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
10 likes Like
“In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—-not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: terra-incognita, wandering 9 likes Like
“A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris's final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow." - describing the mother of Chris McCandless after learning of his starvation in the wild”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
8 likes Like
“to explore the inner country of his own soul.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
8 likes Like
“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…. And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
7 likes Like
“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild 7 likes
“I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming," he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. "But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.
Everett Ruess”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: nature, nomad, overwhelmed, vagabond, vagabond-for-beauty, wanderer, wilderness 6 likes Like
“weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
6 likes Like
“Curiously, Chris didn’t hold everyone to the same exacting standards. One of the individuals he professed to admire greatly over the last two years of his life was a heavy drinker and incorrigible philanderer who regularly beat up his girlfriends. Chris was well aware of this man’s faults yet managed to forgive them. He was also able to forgive, or overlook, the shortcomings of his literary heroes: Jack London was a notorious drunk; Tolstoy, despite his famous advocacy of celibacy, had been an enthusiastic sexual adventurer as young man and went on to father at least thirteen children, some of whom were conceived at the same time the censorious count was thundering in print against the evils of sex.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent," Westerberg reflects, draining his third drink. "He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: christopher-mccandless, into-the-wild, supertramp, travel, travel-writer 2 likes Like
“Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: acrophobia, climbing, devil-s-thumb, summit 2 likes Like
“buffeted by the passions and longings of youth.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” “The Wit of Porportuk.” He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.... And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“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. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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. And I lived to tell my tale.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: desire, hopelessness, inspiring, life-changing, love, teenage, young 1 likes Like
“Se essa aventura se revelar fatal e nunca mais tiver notÃcias de mim, quero que saiba que você é um grande homem. Caminho agora para dentro da Natureza Selvagem”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
― Christopher Johnson McCandless, Into the Wild
tags: adventure 1 likes Like
“Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Such ertramp, master of his own destiny.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“[…] Ich möchte aber gern noch einmal auf meinen Ratschlag zurückkommen; ich finde nämlich, dass du dein Leben radikal ändern und ganz mutig Dinge in Angriff nehmen solltest, die dir früher nie in den Sinn gekommen wären oder vor denen du im letzten Moment zurückgeschreckt bist. So viele Leute sind unglücklich mit ihrem Leben und schaffen es trotzdem nicht, etwas an ihrer Situation zu ändern, weil sie total fixiert sind auf ein angepasstes Leben in Sicherheit, in dem möglichst alles gleichbleibt – alles Dinge, die einem scheinbar inneren Frieden garantieren. In Wirklichkeit wird die Abenteuerlust im Menschen jedoch am meisten durch eine gesicherte Zukunft gebremst. Leidenschaftliche Abenteuerlust ist die Quelle, aus der der Mensch die Kraft schöpft, sich dem Leben zu stellen. Freude empfinden wir, wenn wir neue Erfahrungen machen, und von daher gibt es kein größeres Glück als in einem immer wieder wechselnden Horizont blicken zu dürfen, an dem jeder Tag mit einer neuen ganz anderen Sonne anbricht. Wenn du mehr aus deinem Leben machen willst, Ron, dann muss du deine Vorliebe für monotone, gesicherte Verhältnisse ablegen und das Chaos in dein Leben lassen, auch wenn es dir am Anfang verrückt erscheinen mag. Aber sobald du dich an ein solches Leben einmal gewöhnt hast, wirst du die volle Bedeutung erkennen, die darin verborgen liegt, und die schier unfassbare Schönheit. Um es auf den Punkt zu bringen, Ron: Geh fort raus Salton City und fang an zu reisen. […] Sei nicht so träge und bleib nicht einfach immer am selben Platz. Beweg dich, reise, werde ein Nomade, erschaffe dir jeden Tag einen neuen Horizont. Du wirst noch so lange leben, Ron, und es wäre eine Schande, wenn du die Gelegenheit nicht nutzen würdest, dein Leben von Grund auf zu ändern, um in ein vollkommen neues Reich der Erfahrungen einzutreten.
Es stimmt nicht, wenn du glaubst, dass Glück einzig und allein zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen entspringt. Gott hat es überall um uns herum verteilt. Es steckt in jeder kleinen Erfahrung, die wir machen. Wir müssen einfach den Mut haben, uns von unserem gewohnten Lebensstil abzukehren und uns auf ein unkonventionelles Leben einzulassen.
Vor allem möchte ich dir sagen, dass du weder mich noch sonstwen brauchst, um dieses neue, hoffnungsfroh schimmernde Licht in dein Leben zu bringen. Du musst nur zur Tür hinausgehen und die Hand danach ausstrecken und schon ist es dein. Du selbst bist dein einziger Feind, du und deine Sturheit, mit der du dich weigerst, dich auf etwas Neues einzulassen. […]
Du wirst staunen, was es alles zu sehen gibt, und du wirst Leute kennenlernen, von denen man eine Menge lernen kann. Aber mach es ohne viel Geld, keine Motels, und dein Essen kochst du dir selbst. Je weniger du ausgibst, desto höher der Erlebniswert. […]”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: isolation, papar, peace, spirit 1 likes Like
“At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Alaska toprakları merhametsizdir, ne umutları ne de özlemleri umursar.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: biyografi 1 likes Like
“he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“McCandless was stirred by the austerity of the landscape, by its saline beauty. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it, in sere geology and clean slant of light.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Much of the food he put on the table came from hunting—despite the fact that he was uncomfortable killing animals. “My dad cried every time he shot a deer,” Billie says, 'but we had to eat, so he did it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Thoreau’s declaration in “Civil Disobedience”: “I heartily accept the motto—‘That government is best which governs least.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“or that they think I’d actually let them pay for my law school if I was going to go….I’ve told them a million times that I have the best car in the world, a car that has spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska, a car that has in all those thousands of miles not given me a single problem, a car that I will never trade in, a car that I am very strongly attached to—yet they ignore what I say and think I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be real careful not to accept any gifts from them in the future because they will think they have bought my respect.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-today existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“ways—raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: climbing 0 likes Like
“I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders;”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire (HENRY DAVID THOREAU, JOURNAL)”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: climbing 0 likes Like
“And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice. DONALD BARTHELME, THE DEAD FATHER”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
-Chris McCandless”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: chris-mccandless, into-the-wild 0 likes Like
“Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“prudent”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“incognito.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“ignorance.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“utterly”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“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. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz's life even as he helped fill it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he'd finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you'd call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH, NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD….”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Happiness only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them;”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Alex looks quickly around for signs of trouble," his journal records. "But his entry of Mexico is either unnoticed or ignored. Alexander is jubilant!”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“it would be possible to become a Stone Age native. For over 30 years, I programmed and conditioned myself to this end. In the last 10 of it, I would say I realistically experienced the physical, mental, and emotional reality of the Stone Age. But to borrow a Buddhist phrase, eventually came a setting face-to-face with pure reality. I learned that it is not possible for human beings as we know them to live off the land.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“But then I’m not easily shocked. I’ve had several friends who drowned or got murdered or died in weird accidents. In Alaska you get used to strange stuff happening.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others....”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: into-the-wild, school 0 likes Like
“finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans….”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“bought my respect.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ’CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST.” AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD. ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP MAY 1992”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.
“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“It's not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: conformity, life, novelty, security 2104 likes Like
“I now walk into the wild.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1227 likes Like
“I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.
Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: adventure, conformity, joy, life, security 1167 likes Like
“Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: love 1013 likes Like
“When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: forgiveness, love 768 likes Like
“I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 717 likes Like
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: change, complacency, inspirational 613 likes Like
“I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth. ”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 470 likes Like
“We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
399 likes Like
“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 372 likes Like
“The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
327 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: entitlement, inexperience, krakauer, mccandless, naivete, youth 317 likes Like
“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
317 likes Like
“What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: love 303 likes Like
“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: life-and-living 275 likes Like
“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
248 likes Like
“That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
220 likes Like
“Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
178 likes Like
“The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 176 likes Like
“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: free, happy, life, wild 131 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: inspirational 125 likes Like
“On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's "Family Happiness", having marked several passages that moved him:
"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?" ...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
121 likes Like
“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
100 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
79 likes Like
“According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: challenges, life, success 76 likes Like
“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...I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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. And I lived to tell my tale.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
65 likes Like
“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
65 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
64 likes
“I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: freedom, into-the-wild 48 likes Like
“The fragility of crystal is not a weakness but a fineness. My parents understood that fine crystal glass had to be cared for or may be shattered. But when it came to my brother, they didn’t seem to know or care that their course of their secret action brought the kind of devastation that could cut them. Their fraudulent marriage and our father’s denial of his other son was for Chris a murder of every day’s truth. He felt his whole life turned like a river suddenly reversing the direction of its flow. Suddenly running uphill. These revelations struck at the core of Chris’s sense of identity. They made his entire childhood seem like fiction. Chris never told them he knew and made me promise silence as well.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: alex-supertramp, chris-mccandless, into-the-wild 41 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: adventure, climbing, into-the-wild, krakauer 41 likes Like
“He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
39 likes Like
“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
38 likes Like
“When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex. After I dropped off the hitchhikers," Franz continues," I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn't used to drinking, so it made me real sick. Hoped it'd kill me, but it didn't. Just made me real, real sick.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
38 likes Like
“If you don't take it, I'm going to throw it away," Alex cheerfully retorted. "I don't want to know what time it is. I don't want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
36 likes Like
“Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that care nothing for hope or longing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
29 likes Like
“Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
27 likes Like
“Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. "He'd tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
27 likes Like
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
27 likes Like
“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. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex.
In my case - and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless - that was a very different thing from wanting to die.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
25 likes Like
“My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
21 likes Like
“But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: dreams, inspirational, into-the-wild 21 likes Like
“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don't want one. You don’t need to worry about me; I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I'm living like this by choice.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
19 likes Like
“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..”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: death, history, life, sence 18 likes Like
“The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
16 likes Like
“Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
15 likes Like
“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… I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
15 likes Like
“<...> though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won't be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991 - January 7, 1992. But this is not important. 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: enjoy-life, inspirational 14 likes Like
“Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.
McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
12 likes Like
“I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
10 likes Like
“When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: atheism, inspirational, religious 10 likes Like
“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
10 likes Like
“In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—-not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: terra-incognita, wandering 9 likes Like
“A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris's final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow." - describing the mother of Chris McCandless after learning of his starvation in the wild”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
8 likes Like
“to explore the inner country of his own soul.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
8 likes Like
“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…. And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
8 likes Like
“It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
7 likes Like
“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild 7 likes
“I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming," he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. "But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.
Everett Ruess”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: nature, nomad, overwhelmed, vagabond, vagabond-for-beauty, wanderer, wilderness 6 likes Like
“weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
6 likes Like
“Curiously, Chris didn’t hold everyone to the same exacting standards. One of the individuals he professed to admire greatly over the last two years of his life was a heavy drinker and incorrigible philanderer who regularly beat up his girlfriends. Chris was well aware of this man’s faults yet managed to forgive them. He was also able to forgive, or overlook, the shortcomings of his literary heroes: Jack London was a notorious drunk; Tolstoy, despite his famous advocacy of celibacy, had been an enthusiastic sexual adventurer as young man and went on to father at least thirteen children, some of whom were conceived at the same time the censorious count was thundering in print against the evils of sex.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
5 likes Like
“Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
5 likes Like
“You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent," Westerberg reflects, draining his third drink. "He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
3 likes Like
“Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: christopher-mccandless, into-the-wild, supertramp, travel, travel-writer 2 likes Like
“Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: acrophobia, climbing, devil-s-thumb, summit 2 likes Like
“buffeted by the passions and longings of youth.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” “The Wit of Porportuk.” He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.... And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
2 likes Like
“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. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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. And I lived to tell my tale.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: desire, hopelessness, inspiring, life-changing, love, teenage, young 1 likes Like
“Se essa aventura se revelar fatal e nunca mais tiver notÃcias de mim, quero que saiba que você é um grande homem. Caminho agora para dentro da Natureza Selvagem”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
― Christopher Johnson McCandless, Into the Wild
tags: adventure 1 likes Like
“Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Such ertramp, master of his own destiny.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“[…] Ich möchte aber gern noch einmal auf meinen Ratschlag zurückkommen; ich finde nämlich, dass du dein Leben radikal ändern und ganz mutig Dinge in Angriff nehmen solltest, die dir früher nie in den Sinn gekommen wären oder vor denen du im letzten Moment zurückgeschreckt bist. So viele Leute sind unglücklich mit ihrem Leben und schaffen es trotzdem nicht, etwas an ihrer Situation zu ändern, weil sie total fixiert sind auf ein angepasstes Leben in Sicherheit, in dem möglichst alles gleichbleibt – alles Dinge, die einem scheinbar inneren Frieden garantieren. In Wirklichkeit wird die Abenteuerlust im Menschen jedoch am meisten durch eine gesicherte Zukunft gebremst. Leidenschaftliche Abenteuerlust ist die Quelle, aus der der Mensch die Kraft schöpft, sich dem Leben zu stellen. Freude empfinden wir, wenn wir neue Erfahrungen machen, und von daher gibt es kein größeres Glück als in einem immer wieder wechselnden Horizont blicken zu dürfen, an dem jeder Tag mit einer neuen ganz anderen Sonne anbricht. Wenn du mehr aus deinem Leben machen willst, Ron, dann muss du deine Vorliebe für monotone, gesicherte Verhältnisse ablegen und das Chaos in dein Leben lassen, auch wenn es dir am Anfang verrückt erscheinen mag. Aber sobald du dich an ein solches Leben einmal gewöhnt hast, wirst du die volle Bedeutung erkennen, die darin verborgen liegt, und die schier unfassbare Schönheit. Um es auf den Punkt zu bringen, Ron: Geh fort raus Salton City und fang an zu reisen. […] Sei nicht so träge und bleib nicht einfach immer am selben Platz. Beweg dich, reise, werde ein Nomade, erschaffe dir jeden Tag einen neuen Horizont. Du wirst noch so lange leben, Ron, und es wäre eine Schande, wenn du die Gelegenheit nicht nutzen würdest, dein Leben von Grund auf zu ändern, um in ein vollkommen neues Reich der Erfahrungen einzutreten.
Es stimmt nicht, wenn du glaubst, dass Glück einzig und allein zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen entspringt. Gott hat es überall um uns herum verteilt. Es steckt in jeder kleinen Erfahrung, die wir machen. Wir müssen einfach den Mut haben, uns von unserem gewohnten Lebensstil abzukehren und uns auf ein unkonventionelles Leben einzulassen.
Vor allem möchte ich dir sagen, dass du weder mich noch sonstwen brauchst, um dieses neue, hoffnungsfroh schimmernde Licht in dein Leben zu bringen. Du musst nur zur Tür hinausgehen und die Hand danach ausstrecken und schon ist es dein. Du selbst bist dein einziger Feind, du und deine Sturheit, mit der du dich weigerst, dich auf etwas Neues einzulassen. […]
Du wirst staunen, was es alles zu sehen gibt, und du wirst Leute kennenlernen, von denen man eine Menge lernen kann. Aber mach es ohne viel Geld, keine Motels, und dein Essen kochst du dir selbst. Je weniger du ausgibst, desto höher der Erlebniswert. […]”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: isolation, papar, peace, spirit 1 likes Like
“At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“Alaska toprakları merhametsizdir, ne umutları ne de özlemleri umursar.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: biyografi 1 likes Like
“he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes
“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“McCandless was stirred by the austerity of the landscape, by its saline beauty. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it, in sere geology and clean slant of light.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
1 likes Like
“We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Much of the food he put on the table came from hunting—despite the fact that he was uncomfortable killing animals. “My dad cried every time he shot a deer,” Billie says, 'but we had to eat, so he did it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Thoreau’s declaration in “Civil Disobedience”: “I heartily accept the motto—‘That government is best which governs least.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“or that they think I’d actually let them pay for my law school if I was going to go….I’ve told them a million times that I have the best car in the world, a car that has spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska, a car that has in all those thousands of miles not given me a single problem, a car that I will never trade in, a car that I am very strongly attached to—yet they ignore what I say and think I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be real careful not to accept any gifts from them in the future because they will think they have bought my respect.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-today existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“ways—raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders;”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire (HENRY DAVID THOREAU, JOURNAL)”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: climbing 0 likes Like
“And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice. DONALD BARTHELME, THE DEAD FATHER”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
-Chris McCandless”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: chris-mccandless, into-the-wild 0 likes Like
“Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“prudent”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“incognito.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“ignorance.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“utterly”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“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. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz's life even as he helped fill it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he'd finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you'd call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH, NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD….”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Happiness only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them;”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“Alex looks quickly around for signs of trouble," his journal records. "But his entry of Mexico is either unnoticed or ignored. Alexander is jubilant!”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“it would be possible to become a Stone Age native. For over 30 years, I programmed and conditioned myself to this end. In the last 10 of it, I would say I realistically experienced the physical, mental, and emotional reality of the Stone Age. But to borrow a Buddhist phrase, eventually came a setting face-to-face with pure reality. I learned that it is not possible for human beings as we know them to live off the land.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“But then I’m not easily shocked. I’ve had several friends who drowned or got murdered or died in weird accidents. In Alaska you get used to strange stuff happening.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others....”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
tags: into-the-wild, school 0 likes Like
“finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans….”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“bought my respect.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ’CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST.” AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD. ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP MAY 1992”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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“If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
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