"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
"We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel." — Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
"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
"[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
"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
"The journey you travel on your feet is less important than the distance you cover in your head." — Mishka Shubaly
"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order." — John Burroughs
"We’re all aging—what can we do with that? How can we look at it differently? How can we take care of ourselves, push ourselves, or just constantly work on getting to know ourselves better?" — Hilaree Nelson
"I believe that fear is the most powerful and detrimental emotion in life and the biggest culprit keeping us from our dreams...Fear can keep you alive, but it can also keep you from living." — Jeremy Jones The Art of Shralpinism
"There's usually a great outcome if you train your mind to look for one." — Jeremy Jones The Art of Shralpinism
"...each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself...To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top." — Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes." — Charles Swindoll
"We realize that every day is a gift. To become who we are and share what we do is a gift. To help one another is a gift." — Lonnie Kauk Alpinist Magazine, Issue 66, "Magic Line"
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime." — Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
"Never be certain of anything. It's a sign of weakness." — 4th Doctor Doctor Who, "The Face of Evil"
"Such illusions, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"If I had other senses, there are other things I should know. It is nonsense to suppose, when I have perceived the exquisite division of running water, or a flower, that my separate senses can make, that there would be nothing more to perceive were we but endowed with other modes of perception. How could we imagine flavour, or perfume, without the senses of taste and smell? They are completely unimaginable. There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"This is not a book that relishes its own discoveries; it prefers to relish its own ignorances." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
