Into Thin Air: A Personal Account Of The Mount Everest Disaster Quotes
"I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight."
"The only food I’d been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&Ms."
"At 29,028 feet up in the troposphere, so little oxygen was reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child."
"The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic."
"Perhaps we had become a little arrogant with our fine new technique of ice-claw and rubber slipper, our age of easy mechanical conquest."
"We had forgotten that the mountain still holds the master card, that it will grant success only in its own good time."
"The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway."
"For those who dare to face their dreams, the experience offers something special beyond the power of words to describe."
"I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life."
"Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there."
"The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension."
"But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have."
"Smoking is impossible; eating tends to make one vomit; the necessity of reducing weight to a bare minimum forbids the importation of literature beyond that supplied by the labels on tins of food."
"I doubt if anyone would claim to enjoy life at high altitudes—enjoy, that is, in the ordinary sense of the word."
"I was not sure what could be accomplished by means of tenacity and little else, but the target was set high and each rebuff only saw me more determined to see at least one major dream through to its fulfillment."
"This would be home for the next several months, until the mountain was climbed."
"There's no way in bloody hell I'm spending another night in this shit hole."
"Their mountaineering experience varied from none at all to very slight—certainly none of them had the kind of experience which would make an ascent of Everest a reasonable goal."
"Thinking fast, I lied and told him not to worry, that the blood was from a cut on his lip. That calmed him a little, and we continued down."
"By the time they get Ngawang down to Pheriche it may be too late to save him."
"For the next forty hours, Silver, Hunt, and Litch took turns pumping oxygen into Ngawang’s lungs with the ambu bag, squeezing it by hand twenty times each minute."
"Despite the weather and the Montenegrins’ defeat, it didn’t augur well for our own summit assault, scheduled to get under way in less than six hours."
"But the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies chasing a righteous fix is a fallacy, at least in the case of Everest."
"Climbing was like life itself, only it was cast in much sharper relief, and nothing had ever hooked Beck to such a degree."
"I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain."
"If there is a more desolate, inhospitable habitation anywhere on the planet, I hope never to see it."
"Every time I coughed, the pain from my torn thoracic cartilage felt like someone was jabbing a knife beneath my ribs, and brought tears to my eyes."
"In this godforsaken place, I felt disconnected from the climbers around me—emotionally, spiritually, physically—to a degree I hadn’t experienced on any previous expedition."
"The most rewarding aspects of mountaineering derive from the sport’s emphasis on self-reliance, on making critical decisions and dealing with the consequences, on personal responsibility."
"To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven."
"In order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die."
"Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead."
"The literature of Everest is rife with accounts of hallucinatory experiences attributable to hypoxia and fatigue."
"I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got through in spite of the weather but for the sickening of a second companion."
"We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint."
"I felt at times as if I wasn’t really climbing the mountain—that surrogates were doing it for me."
"There’s no oxygen here! These bottles are all empty!"
"My attempts to engage him in conversation went nowhere. His ill humor, I figured, was perhaps due to the abscessed tooth that had been causing him pain."
"Hall had become so adept at running climbers of all abilities up and down Everest that he got a little cocky, perhaps."
"Truth be told, climbing Everest has always been an extraordinarily dangerous undertaking and doubtless always will be."
"Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them."
"On Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance."
"The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined that my brain simply shorted out and went dark."
"Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of prudence."
"Eventually I spoke of my lingering disquietude to Klev Schoening, whose home was not far from mine."
"I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit."
"Analyzing what went wrong on Everest is a useful enough enterprise; it might conceivably prevent some deaths down the road."
"In the case of the guided ilk, it rapidly became clear to me in 1996 that few of the clients on the peak (myself included) truly appreciated the gravity of the risks we faced."