Into The Wild Quotes
"Happiness is only real when shared." - Christopher McCandless
"It's not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong." - Christopher McCandless
"When you want something in life, you just gotta reach out and grab it." - Christopher McCandless
"I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once." - Christopher McCandless
"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism." - Christopher McCandless
"The freedom and simple beauty is too good to pass up..." - Christopher McCandless
"But his entry into Mexico is either unnoticed or ignored. Alexander is jubilant!"
"Alex is dumbfounded. Encounters some canal officials who can speak a little English."
"At last! Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and heads south."
"Alex finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans..."
"All hopes collapse! The canal does not reach the ocean but merely peters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded."
"He greeted the new year by observing the full moon as it rose over the Gran Desierto—the Great Desert."
"In great frustration, the journal reads, he screams and beats canoe with oar."
"Can this be the same Alex that set out in July, 1990? Malnutrition and the road have taken their toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost. But his spirit is soaring."
"It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you."
"He had a way with animals. They’d follow him around, cry after him, want to sleep with him."
"I decided I couldn’t believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex."
"The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler."
"I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness."
"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly."
"God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me."
"After all the lone trail is the best.... I’ll never stop wandering."
"It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty."
"Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs."
"Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."
"He was intensely private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme."
"Chris was good at almost everything he ever tried, which made him supremely overconfident."
"I heartily accept the motto—'That government is best which governs least.'"
"The whole idea was to lose our bearings, to push ourselves into unknown territory."
"It wasn't just running Chris took so seriously. He was like that about everything."
"If something bothered him, he wouldn’t come right out and say it. He’d keep it to himself, harboring his resentment, letting the bad feelings build and build."
"We worked very, very hard. We did without when the kids were little, saved what we earned, and invested it for the future."
"Chris thought we were idiots for worrying about him."
"In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing."
"I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life."
"By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration."
"At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest."
"But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights."
"I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me."
"The fact that I survived my Alaska adventure and McCandless did not survive his was largely a matter of chance."
"At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage."
"Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works."
"He wanted to prove to himself that he could make it on his own, without anybody else’s help."
"Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom."
"It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others."
"He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, 'that mattered.'"
"It would probably be a mistake, however, to conclude thereby that McCandless failed to appreciate the beauty of the country around him, that he was unmoved by the power of the landscape."
"McCandless wasn’t some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair."
"Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult... And McCandless almost pulled it off."
"The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent."
"Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death."
"It is nearly impossible for modern man to imagine what it is like to live by hunting."
"Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime."
"We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God."
"I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"