Mark Adams > Quotes

“I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant's explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime. Nowadays, we throw around the word "sublime" to describe gooey desserts or overpriced handbags. In Kant's epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver's head hurt. Machu Picchu isn't just beautiful, it's sublime.”
― Mark Adams

“On a globe it looks like a swollen California. Within that space, though, are twenty-thousand-foot peaks, the world’s deepest canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), unmapped Amazon jungle and the driest desert on earth.”
― Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

“So the Inca Trail isn’t just a pretty shortcut that Pachacutec took on his way to his summer home?” “Mark, you can’t finish the Inca Trail and not know that this was the end point of a pilgrimage.”
― Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

“Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you'll get some idea of what historians face.”
― Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

“If you've ever thought, 'The new Times Square is delightful but would be even better if it were more claustrophobic and nearly impossible to leave', the Aguas Calientes is calling your name”
― Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“The ability to arrive uninvited in an alien land and convince one’s hosts that almost everything they believe is wrong requires a rather forceful personality.”
― Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

“Bring a gun and someone slower than you.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Alaska is essentially a small continent: big enough to hold Texas, California, and Montana (the second-, third-, and fourth-largest states) and still have room left over for New England, Hawaii, and a couple of metropolises. It contains seven mountain ranges and ten peaks taller than any in the Lower 48. Its waterfront accounts for half of all the coast in the United States. Louisiana has four times as many miles of paved roads.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium Pentothal.”
― Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

“Because so much of Alaska is hundreds of miles from the road system, the state has six times as many pilots per capita as the rest of the United States. Bush”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“It's a real problem now - people don't know how to enjoy life. They want hedonism, short-term thrills.”
― Mark Adams

“That the story of Atlantis—much beloved by psychics, UFO spotters, and conspiracy theorists—should have sprung from one of history’s greatest minds struck me, to put it lightly, as a little odd. It was like hearing that”
― Mark Adams, Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

“Alaska’s chief asset, “more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted,” is its scenery. Echoing his Elder shipmate John Muir, the father of American mapmaking notes that, for the one Yosemite in California, “Alaska has hundreds.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Efrain shrugged. 'There's energy in everything, Mark. Remember, you can't everything in a book.”
― Mark Adams

“I told him he must reform, for a man who neither believed in God nor glaciers must be very bad, indeed the worst of all unbelievers. —John Muir, Travels in Alaska”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“On June 4, 1892, twenty-seven men met in San Francisco to form the Sierra Club. Muir was chosen as president, a title he would hold until his death.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“They take our property, take away ground, and when we complain to them about it, they employ a lawyer and go to court and win the case,” one Tlingit leader testified before the district governor in 1884. “We are very poor now. The time will come when we”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Because Alaska is such a conservative place, you’ve got this bizarre disconnect between tenaciously clinging to this self-identification as rugged individuals—people who say to themselves, ‘I came here to be free of government regulation’—and the current and historical reality, which is dependence on the federal budget. It’s like living in a floodplain. People are just in total denial about it.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“The famous introduction to 1901’s Our National Parks shows a touch of manifesto seeping into the pastoral sweetness and natural light: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“If you are old, go by all means, but if you are young, wait. The scenery of Alaska is much grander than anything else of its kind in the world, and it is not wise to dull one’s capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“I fell into the temporary role of spokesman for America, trying to answer questions as best I could: Why do Americans eat so much processed food? Why do they get so little vacation time? (Everyone in our group had more or less taken off the last month of summer.) Why do they love guns? Having been placed in this situation frequently during my travels, I blamed everything on the Republicans, which always satisfies Europeans.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Unalaska’s enormous processing plants convert most of it into fillets for fish sticks or a paste called surimi, much of which is frozen in blocks and shipped off to Japan to be reconstituted into budget sushi. “By the time they’re done, it’s odorless, tasteless protein,” Dickrell said. In a century, the local economy had evolved from fur to war to king crab to fake crab.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Facing down a bear is like facing down a drunk: You just have to bluff that you’re tougher than he is,” David said.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Thanks to railroad men like Harriman, the wild American West had been all but subdued in less than a hundred years. In 1805, Lewis and Clark had witnessed herds of buffalo so large their movements shook the ground.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“I'd found fear of death and failure to be excellent motivators.”
― Mark Adams

“So the peasants observed things quite accurately," she said. "But their explanation of what happened was completely off the mark."--pg 214”
― Mark Adams

“There's a general law in life,' he said. 'The body and mind only get stronger when traumatized.”
― Mark Adams

“When he opened the back of his SUV, he had to move some kites to make room for my bag. “You never know when you’ll get the sudden urge to fly a kite,” he said.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Facing down a bear is like facing down a drunk: You just have to bluff that you’re tougher than he is,”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier