Into The Wild By Jon Krakauer Quotes & Sayings

I was a functional addict. — James Taylor

It's harder to make real audio than special effects audio. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

[Chris] gave his life in exchange for knowledge and his story is his contribution to the world. I feel complete now to put this story behind me as it was on my mind for quite some time. — Krakauer Jon

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
-Chris McCandless — Jon Krakauer

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

I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice. — Ayn Rand

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

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

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout; My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir; The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls; A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. — Cheryl Strayed

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

As I point out in the very first pages of 'Into the Wild,' I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist. — Jon Krakauer

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

The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive. — Jon Krakauer

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

I now walk into the wild. — Jon Krakauer

At last, in the dead of the night, when the street was very still indeed, Little Dorrit laid the heavy head upon her bosom, and soothed her to sleep. And thus she sat at the gate, as it were alone; looking up at the stars, and seeing the clouds pass over them in their wild flight-which was the dance at Little Dorrit's party. — Charles Dickens

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

Don't," she said to her brother.
"What?"
"Don't act like I'm dead already. I, for one, am not giving up. — Melissa De La Cruz

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