I waned movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. --from ''Family Happiness" by Tolstoy, passage highlighted by McCandless. (查看原文)
At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a word of abstraction and security and martial excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut from the raw throb of existence. (查看原文)
London's fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial world, his championing of the great unwashed--all of it mirrored McCandless's passions....He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were words of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, bees and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print. (查看原文)
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. the joy of life comes from our encounters with new experience, and hence there is no greater hy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. (查看原文)
It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought. (查看原文)
Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn't incompetent--he wouldn't have lasted 113 days if he were. And he wasn't a nutcase, he wasn't a sociopath, he wasn't an outcast. (查看原文)
The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. the trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. (查看原文)
The accumulated clutter of day-today existence--the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the lunch, the inescapable prison of your genes--all o it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and b the seriousness of the task at hand. (查看原文)
..extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds. (查看原文)
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. (查看原文)
