Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, is about a young man who leaves everything to live in the wild.
Christopher Johnson McCandless leaves his family and gives away everything to start a new life.
Some people in the book’s reviews criticize Christopher as a whiny, spoiled brat. But few people follow through on their dreams.
Most people’s dreams die before they do. Christopher died fulfilling his dream.
Into The Wild Quotes With Page Numbers, Chapter 1: The Alaska Interior
“I now walk into the wild.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 3, 69, 134
“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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 7
“It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.”
~John Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 9
Chapter 2: The Stampede Trail
“I wanted 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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 15
“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 18
“Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 18
“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 18
“He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 22
“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 22
“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 22
Into The Wild Chapter 4: Detrital Wash
“The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 32
“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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 34
“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 37
“…though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won’t be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991 – January 7, 1992. But this is not important. It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 37
Into The Wild Chapter 5: Bullhead City
“He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 44, 45
Into The Wild Chapter 6: Anza-Borrego
“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don’t want one. You don’t need to worry about me; I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I’m living like this by choice.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 51
“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. 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 experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 56, 57
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. 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 experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 56, 57
“I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. 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 experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.
Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 56-58
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 57
“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
-Chris McCandless”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 57
“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 57
“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. 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 experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 57
“When Alex left for Alaska,” Franz remembers, “I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn’t believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex. After I dropped off the hitchhikers,” Franz continues,” I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn’t used to drinking, so it made me real sick. Hoped it’d kill me, but it didn’t. Just made me real, real sick.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 60
Into The Wild Chapter 7: Carthage
“Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.
McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 65, 66
Into The Wild Chapter 9: Davis Gulch
“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…”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 87
“We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 96
“That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 96
“But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 96
Into The Wild Chapter 11: Chesapeake Beach
“Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. “He’d tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 112
“…careers were demeaning “twentieth-century inventions,” more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 114
Into The Wild Chapter 12: Annandale
“I’m going to paraphrase Thoreau here… rather than love, than money, than fame, than fame, give me truth.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 117
“Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 122
Into The Wild Chapter 13: Virginia Beach
“A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris’s final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.” – describing the mother of Chris McCandless after learning of his starvation in the wild”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 132
Into The Wild Chapter 14: The Stikine Ice Cap
“My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards…”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 135
“I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 135
“Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 143
Into The Wild Chapter 15: The Stiking Ice Cap
“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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 155
“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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 155
“At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn’t yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who’d entrusted the deceased with their hearts.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 155
“At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn’t yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who’d entrusted the deceased with their hearts. 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. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.
In my case – and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless – that was a very different thing from wanting to die.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Pages 155, 156
Into The Wild Chapter 16: The Alaska Interior
“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 163
“On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy’s “Family Happiness”, having marked several passages that moved him:
“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others…
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one’s neighbor – such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps – what more can the heart of a man desire?” …”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 169
Into The Wild Chapter 17: The Stampede Trail
“In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—-not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 174
“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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 182
“to explore the inner country of his own soul.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 183
“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.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 183
Into The Wild Chapter 18: The Stampede Trail
“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..”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 187
“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…. And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 189
![A picture of a smiley face drawn on a beach, with the headline: “Happiness [is] only real when shared” ― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild "](https://i0.wp.com/agelessinvesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Happiness-is-only-real-when-shared-―-Jon-Krakauer-Into-the-Wild.jpg?resize=537%2C806&ssl=1)
“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, Page 189
Into The Wild Summary
In his book Into the Wild, author Jon Krakauer chronicles the life and death of Christopher McCandless, a young man who left behind his affluent life in 1990 to embark on a journey of self-exploration in the Alaskan wilderness.
Despite his best efforts, McCandless could not survive the harsh conditions and perished in the summer of 1992. Krakauer’s work delves into the motivations of McCandless’s journey and offers insight into the multifaceted nature of his experience.
Through vivid anecdotes provided by those McCandless encountered along the way and Krakauer’s poignant reflections, Into the Wild conveys a captivating and thought-provoking account of one man’s search for purpose in the world.
Further Reading: