Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.
When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.
What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
I read somewhere… how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong… to measure yourself at least once.
I’m going to paraphrase Thoreau here… rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness… give me truth.
Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don’t want one.
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..
According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless’s beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn’t a challenge at all.
But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.
I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.
I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.
I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last – overpowering, overwhelming,” he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. “But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.Everett Ruess
Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, “No thanks,” “Not interested,” or even “Fuck off, creep.
It’s not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.
It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty…
The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive.
Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.
I thought climbing the Devil’s Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines on you..
He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
I didn’t doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues…problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.
When an individual is raped in this country, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets away with the crime.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It’s mostly about random pointless death and misery.
Happiness means nothing to me. I just want to have meaning and purpose.