"If you set out with purpose to do something amazing, you invariably find that circumstance will lend a hand." — Andy Kirkpatrick Kirkpatrick's Climbing Notes, "Hard Things Easy"
"Set goals for what you want to feel rather than what you want to accomplish. Nothing ever goes quite to plan, so leave yourself open to opportunities." — Unknown heard on a podcast
"The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life. Thirty years old. I was now an adult, with or without my consent, and adults are responsible for their lives. I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child – why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns the patterns of living. Every second has value. But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what’s next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"It’s not about a list. It’s about the experiences. The list just gets you out there." — Brendon Leonard Semi-Rad, "The Point Of Doing Pointless Things With Your Friends"
"Setting goals and being too focused on your goal can prevent you from taking other opportunities that are presenting themselves to you. It’s better to lead your life by dreams and what if’s than by concrete goals that you’re 100% dedicated to." — Unknown heard on a podcast
"If we’ve written the endings before we’ve lived them, we’re doomed for disappointment." — Andrew Steven Adventure Journal, "Trail Weight: Losing 100 Pounds to Hike the John Muir Trail"
"Each of us has a mash-up of talents and experiences and potential that plants something in us, and becomes a dream...A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"Of course, goals help us get a lot done. But they often remove our attention from the experience to the achievement." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting, in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be." — Zig Ziglar
"You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine." — Darren Hardy The Compound Effect
"[Age] is in your head. It’s whatever you believe. You know, my parents were old when they were in their 40s; that’s the way they thought. The way they acted. It was their assumptions about life. I’m not like that; I think you can talk yourself into anything. Age is just a number, as long as your body is willing. Age is meaningless." — Dierdre Wolownick (Alex Honnold's mom) Adventure Journal
"Was I the person, the climber, that I believed I had been? Those events shaped who I was, and now they were receding into the distance." — Chris Jones Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968
"There are a few vestiges of my high school years who I paid visits to here and there throughout college, or bump into now and again on social media. It’s a part of my life I no longer identify with. Somewhere that, if I ever did return to, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable in my skin. It’s not that I’m ashamed, or that I don’t cherish the memories, it’s something else. What, I don’t know. For reasons I can’t dimly begin to understand, those disaffected years when I was skating are some of the most nostalgic in my life. They bear no more proximity to my current values and lifestyle...But I don’t want to ruin it by trying to understand it." — Chris Kalman Newsletter
"The trick is to die young as late as possible." — Wolf Bauer via Lowell Skoog Written in the Snows
"The more years you spend on this planet, the more you realize that for all of the gains we have made, we’ve got so far to go. It’s like looking in the rear view mirror – what’s behind us is actually closer than it appears. Despite this unfortunate reality, we persevere with an unwavering courage, moving beyond the barriers created by others, by harnessing a fire that burns deep inside." — Jen Gurecki Sisu Magazine, Issue 1
"The carefree timelessness of my youth was rattled in my twenties. A kind of panic set in. Time became visible. Each choice I made began to feel more and more final, as if every choice was the death of all the others. Millions of doors were locking behind me as I passed them in the hallway. I felt that age thirty – adulthood – was coming like winter. Am I missing out? Am I making the right decisions? Am I becoming the person I want to be? It often dawns too late that we have only one life, only one path, and the choices we make become the story line of our lives." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"...how quickly our moment together had already become a memory." — James Campbell Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild
"This is what our life is like; full of joy, full of sadness, full of longing, full of success, and of bitter disappointments. So full of happiness and suffering at the same time, that sometimes there is just too much of everything. It is then that we grow old." — Nejc Zaplotnik, translated by Mimi Marinsek Alpinist Magazine, Issue 74, "Nejc Zaplotnik, Mountain Poet"
