“And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky.”

“And questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us seek we know not what, ever and ever. But we cannot resist it. It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. We must know that we may know.”

“Glory, battle, great momentsss, are where we give to the world. But we cannot give without receiving. We cannot share what we do not have inside. It is this quiet, the pause between breathsss, that makes us what we truly are. Gives us ssstrength for all our journeys.”

“We cling to our hearts, to what warms them, to what gives us hope, to things we can look upon and know the world will someday be okay again.”

“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.”

“The world tells us what we need to know when we are ready to know it and not before. That's the way of things.”