Ed Viesturs · 342 pages
Rating: (4K votes)
“K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It's just there. It's indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The "savageness" is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“That’s leadership: lead by example, lead from the front, inspire people to follow your lead.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“Any “story” can be told in dozens of different ways. For that very reason, I believe, every time you go back and reexamine an important chapter in your life, you learn something new about it.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“There’s an old and honored tradition in exploration literature that you don’t air your dirty laundry in print. Whatever bickering, name-calling, grudge nursing, and dark funks really took place on the expedition, they’re nobody else’s business.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“By now, a significant portion of the whole Sherpa economy depends on the spring and fall seasons on Everest.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“It reminds me of a very wise saying about mountaineering that my wife, Paula, repeats often: “Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you don’t.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“Morally, however, we had had absolutely no choice but to abort our summit try to help Thor and Chantal get down the mountain. That’s why I find it so hard to stomach all the accounts in recent years—especially on Everest—of climbers ignoring others in trouble for fear a rescue effort would sabotage their own summit bids.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“After two hours of the hardest”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“the men placed willow wands every 50 feet or so to mark their route—as I did in 1992, but as no one bothered to in 1986 or 2008, an oversight that contributed to both tragedies.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“Mountaineering will never be a safe activity and would not be worth doing if it were.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
“And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Bend Sinister
“He stopped. “You're upset. I'll shut up and leave you”
― Iris Johansen, quote from The Killing Game
“Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!”
― Laurie Notaro, quote from Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood
“Imagine, they said, living an existence where the words out of your mouth changed the very fabric of the world around you.”
― David Anthony Durham, quote from Acacia: The War with the Mein
“you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.”
― Timothy Ferriss, quote from The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
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