More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends JOHN 15:13
Aconcagua, which lies between Mendoza and Santiago, rises to 22,834 feet, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere and only about 6,000 feet short of Mount Everest.
‘Not if I wore enough clothes.’ ‘Then you’d starve to death. You can’t climb mountains on a little piece of chocolate and a sip of wine.’
‘It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.’
Only the lungs, the skin, the head and the genitals of the corpses were thrown aside.
Strength. Life is hard but it is worth living. Even suffering. Courage.
God was the kind of being who watched over the destiny of each individual. To Pedro, God was the love which existed between two human beings, or a group of human beings. Thus love was all important.
would have been possible now to avoid eating such things as rotten lungs and putrid intestines of bodies they had cut up weeks before, but half the boys continued to do so because they had come to need the stronger taste. It had taken a supreme effort of will for these boys to eat human flesh at all, but once they had started and persevered, appetite had come with the eating, for the instinct to survive was a harsh tyrant which demanded not just that they eat their companions but that they get used to doing so.
‘Leave them,’ said the other. ‘It’s that lunatic who’s looking for his boy who went down in the plane which crashed in the cordillera.’
I have learned that life is love, and that love is giving to your neighbour.
If anything, the experience had made him less religious; he now had a stronger belief in man.
Each day that passed had peeled off layer upon layer of superficiality until they were left only with what they truly cared for: their families, their novias, their faith in God and their homeland. They now despised the world of fashionable clothes, nightclubs, flirtatious girls, and idle living. They determined to take their work more seriously, to be more devout in their religious observances, and to dedicate more time to their families.
Every member of every family confronted the knowledge that their husbands, mothers, and sons were not only dead but might have been eaten.
Thank God that the forty-five were there, for sixteen homes have regained their children.’ The father of
