“It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well-dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.”

“Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.”

“Your desire to do what you want to do has to be greater than the world's desire to stop you.”

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. ”

“It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.”

“Nothing, I suppose, exasperates a woman more than the sexual desire for her of a man who is physically repellent to her, and when, to put it bluntly, he will not take no for an answer, she may very well come to hate him.”