“I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.”

Source: Into the Wild

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from …" by Jon Krakauer?
Jon Krakauer photo
Jon Krakauer 54
American outdoors writer and journalist 1954

Related quotes

Jon Krakauer photo
Michael Ondaatje photo
Henry Adams photo
Robert Hunter (author) photo

“From the dawn of the world the chief duty of a parent has been to keep his family secure from want.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 60
Context: The greatest obstacle that confronted Tolstoy lies rooted deep in the soul of man. It is the fear of poverty and the dread of want which ages of struggle with man and beast and with all the adverse elements of nature has bred in us. Surely history teaches us too well the nature and character of man for us to believe readily that there are many fathers and mothers who would ever consent to become Christians on the conditions set forth by Tolstoy.... who to day would fail to condemn unreservedly any father who would take his babies from a comfortable home to live hungry and shelterless in the forests and fields. From the dawn of the world the chief duty of a parent has been to keep his family secure from want.

“In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the Greek world.”

Peter Green (1924) British historian

Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography, page 32.

Martin Buber photo

“Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 178 -->

Milan Kundera photo
Kim Harrison photo
Robert Lynn Asprin photo

“So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.”

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Related topics