"When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them."

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."

"I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve."

"It's not a real adventure when you have to pay for it."

"I think I mainly climb mountains because I get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. I never attempt to analyze these things too thoroughly, but I think that all mountaineers do get a great deal of satisfaction out of overcoming some challenge which they think is very difficult for them, or which perhaps may be a little dangerous."

"Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it."

"Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it."

"No one remembers who climbed Mount Everest the second time."

"It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves."

"Poetry and art are the breath of life to her."

"Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist."

"The way out of trouble is never as simple as the way in."

"Common sense is compelled to make its way without the enthusiasm of anyone."

"There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion, even by the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."

"There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust."

"I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things."

"The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found."

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,"

"I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep!"

"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive"

"In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember."

"...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair."

"A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young."

"You call it hope — that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire."