Why is it that good always has to fight an uphill battle?"I thought for a moment, then said, "I don't know. Maybe that's the point. Good things are higher up.

To everyone who kept staring at the horizon, it always seemed like the earth and sky met and kissed each other, the very thought of that seemed to make every single thing in the universe beautiful. But only the sky and earth knew the distance between them, only they knew the fact that they could never be together.

Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after. Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge_.There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find what I really sought was something I had left behind.

A week feels like a year when you__e seventeen and in love. A twenty minute drive might as well be an ocean. But we were together again and the whole world was rejoicing, even the gravel crunched melodiously under our feet as we danced onward through the night.

Feel yourself climbing the mountain.

Fame is neither something to value nor to view as a threat.